One problem with the media reporting on the Aged Care issues

With so much on the news lately about Aged CAre and the atrocious conditions, one point keeps getting brought up about how the clients are being fed for $6 per day.

Now this seems like a tiny amount, but lets think about it rationally for a moment.

If you look at a normal family on a budget, we can assume that they don't go to restaurants or buy $15 smashed avo on toast every morning. According to the Money Smart website HERE the average family spends $336/week on Food and Drinks. Thats about double what my family spends, but lets work on that.

So a family of 4 with $336/week, that works out at $12 per person per day on food and drinks. That is for 2 big happy health adults and 2 growing kids. Those figures include luxuries such as soft drinks, chocolates etc. In there the Average family also spends $44/week on restuarants. So lets full out $14 for a slab of coke and $5 for a block of cholocate and the restuarants.

That leaves us with $273/week. Now this gives us a figure of $9.75 per person per day. And again, we have those same big fit healthy adults and kids that eat a lot of food.

Now when you look at an old person, especially one that is in their last months of life they don't eat a lot and thats human nature not choice. Part of the bodies natural mechanism for dieing is that they consume less food and have a much lower apetite. An elderly resident in an aged care facility isn't going to chow down on a pork chop at dinner time and a big Ham and Saland roll for lunch.

Then, if you just look at the economics of the whole operation, the aged care centre isn't going down to the local coles and buying a few loaves of bread and bottles of milk. They have national contracts for the supply of ALL of their facilities on a daily basis. The mark up when buying retail is astronomical, large operations like this would more than likely be getting their food at 30-50% less cost than the average family could ever dream about.

So if we took our Average family on a budget and give them a 30% discount on their bill, their weekly shop would then be $191 which then gives them a grand total of $6.83 per person per day.

So for the media to be yelling to high heavens how horrible these companies are to only be giving their clients $6 worth of food a day, they might want to have a look at some of the facts behind this.

Now this isn't to say that these facilities are great, my wife works in one and she assures me they are absolutely horrid. But they need to look at the real problem, and that is staff to client ratios. A lot of the nurses don't mistreat the patients because they are horrible people, they slip through the cracks because they have no time to deal with someone that messes up the daily schedule. If a patients poo's their pants, the nurses have no back up to stop their tasks and care for that person. The nursing staff have every minute of their day allocated to tasks, if they slip there is no time to make it up, it just means that a patient misses out on the care they need.