By Nicky Nicky Sloan, CEO of Community Industry Group

Community Industry Group (CI Group) have been aware for more than five years that hospital beds ‘blocked’ by older patients approved for aged care was an issue, but we were all shocked when two years ago heard that Illawarra/Shoalhaven had the worst bed block in the country.

On a typical day up to 150 public hospital beds in the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District (ISLHD) are occupied by patients who no longer need hospital care, but are unable to return home. This is variously called Bed Block or Delayed Discharge and it's a social justice issue, where older people can’t get the full-time appropriate care they need at a very vulnerable point in their lives.

Hospitals are amazing places when you are unwell, and the staff are exceptional. But they are not places to live your life. While most people stay in hospital for an average of four days, the average stay for an older person in this situation is 66 days – and, for many, it's much, much longer. Most of these people will eventually be discharged to a residential aged care home, but the region has a chronic shortage of these vital aged care places.

So, we started to look into it, and found that, despite the obvious demand – and indeed growing demand – the number of aged care beds across the region has not increased in close to a decade. The Illawarra Shoalhaven region has a current aged care deficit of 1,025 beds.

While some new places have opened, an equivalent number of places have closed for a whole range of reasons, including:

• ageing buildings which don’t meet new accreditation standards,
• closure of multi-bed rooms to meet new quality standards and customer demands,
• repurposing of inappropriate stock for community needs,
• As well as governance, financing, staffing and planning obstacles during arguably aged care’s most difficult era.

Exacerbating the issue is the fact that we are also desperately short of Home Care Packages to support older people to live well in their own homes. Current estimates are that we are short 1,024 home care packages across the region. It is no wonder that older people are ending up in hospital.

Now we can’t place the blame at the feet of aged care providers. Aged care is now a free market system, and here it is a market that has failed to meet the needs of local people. The very fact that demand well exceeds supply, but still providers are not able to develop aged care in our region, tells us that.

For the past year, CI Group has been leading a range of projects to address bed block and support older people who are unable to leave hospital, and their families, including the fabulous STARS volunteer transition support services.

You can find out more about bed block, about STARS and about what you can be doing to make sure you don’t end up in this situation in a series of short, informative and plain-English podcasts and vodcasts available on all common platforms. We speak to key leaders who break down the issues behind bed block, and most importantly what we need to do to make sure more older people get out of hospital and back into their lives.

You can listen to our podcasts via YouTube, Spotify or Apple iTunes.

About the writer

Nicky Sloan is the CEO of Community Industry Group. Her latest podcast is Bed Block Part 2: How we got here - causes and complexity with aged care consultant Mark Sewell. CI Group is the peak body working for not-for-profit human/community services and organisations in southern NSW. The group supports community organisations, promotes expertise and innovation in community development, fosters industry development and advocates for social justice.