The shortage of home care workers is a “worsening problem”, says Sarah Newman, General Manager – Home Services at BaptistCare NSW & ACT, which has 9,000 home care clients.
The situation is starting to improve in some areas, but not all, she said.
“The most challenging areas remain those with higher socioeconomic levels, for example, Northern Sydney, Inner West, and Eastern Suburbs and the Northern Beaches.”
The problem lies in housing. It has been particularly challenging for years to find home care workers from the Northern Beaches to the harbour because those areas are so far geographically from affordable housing.
BaptistCare is careful about where it takes on new clients and won’t take on new clients if they’re not confident they can deliver services.
When they do have staffing gaps, BaptistCare uses brokered staff on a short-term basis, and they ask domestic staff to help with personal care.
“We may redeploy our staff from a domestic assistance service to personal care and replace them temporarily with people from a cleaning agency,” Sarah said.
The provider also reorganises its schedules to ensure essential services, such as personal care or nursing, are always delivered. For example, a two-hour cleaning service might be reduced to one hour or moved to fortnightly.
BaptistCare benefits from having a large pool of workers and can allocate these flexibly if needed. They also have staff who can take on overtime when needed.
“We are undertaking a number of initiatives to recruit more staff,” Sarah said, including:
- advertising,
- $1,500 ‘Join’ and ‘Stay’ bonus program,
- recruitment expos,
- refer-a-friend program,
- traineeships and
- employee benefits such as discounted gym memberships and salary packaging.
Sarah hopes the 15% pay rise will help to attract and retain staff – “plus potentially whatever comes next from the Fair Work Commission (FWC)”.
“Aged care workers do such an important job, and they absolutely deserve to be remunerated more highly for it. As a society we need to be doing more to esteem and reward those who care for people who have invested so much into our community and our lives,” Sarah said.
