Effects of Funding Cuts on the Aged Care in Sydney

What are the effects of funding cuts on the aged care in Sydney for the people aged between 75-80 years?

Hypothesis: This study is developed to assess the effects of cutting funding for the aged care among people aged between 75-80 years in Sydney.

H0: Cutting the funding for the aged care will lead to increased costs.

            Aged care refers to the provision of services to the unique needs of elderly people. The elderly care involves both the services provided in nursing homes as well as the services offered at homes such as home nursing, respite services, mobility, meal preparation, mobility, personal care, provision of common equipment and aid among other specialised services aimed at the promoting the wellbeing of the elders. In Australia, many of the special services for the elderly care are subsidised by the government to ensure the costs are manageable and affordable to all the aged people in Australian (Dyer, Liu et al., 2018).

            Over recent years, the Australian government has reduced the funding for the aged care programs. However, there has been no substantive research that has been carried out to assess the bearings of reducing funding for the aged care to the people aged between 75-80 years in Australia. The following are the bearings of cutting down the funding for the elderly in Australia;

The cost of aged care will increase

            Cutting down the funding for the aged care will lead to an increase in the costs that the old people and their families will have to pay to receive the aged care for the elders. The reduction in the budget allocated for the health care of the elders will lead to the removal or reduced subsidies for the services aimed at the health care for the elders which means that the elderly and their families will have to pay more for the services that are aimed at promoting the wellbeing of the elders. This is because the majority of the health care services are subsidised by the government and reducing the funding will remove parts of these subsidies making the costs of the health care for the elders increase (Mendelson, Aaron et al., 2017).

The number of aged people admitted to the hospitals for the aged care program will reduce

            Funding cuts for the health care programs for the aged people will discourage the hospitals to admit a large number of elders in the facilities as the amounts allocated for the plan of the aged care will reduce leaving the hospitals will inadequate funds to enable them to provide sufficient care for a large number of elders. Therefore, cutting down the funding for the program means the hospitals will have to provide care for only a small percentage of the aged people in Australia (Cheek and Ballantyne, 2014).

The vulnerable aged people may be displaced from the hospitals

            If the funding for the aged care program is reduced, the hospitals and other health care providers may lack enough resources to cater for the current number of old people under the plan. Therefore, this might necessitate the need to displace some old people from the hospitals, further decreasing the accessibility of the aged care among the elderly populations in Australia (Ansel, 2016).

References

Ansel. 2016. The Real Impact of Budget Cuts to Aged Care. [online]. [Accessed 11 December 2018]. Available from World Wide Web: <https://www.ansellstrategic.com.au/impact-budget-cuts-aged-care/>

Cheek, Julianne and Allison Ballantyne. 2014. Moving them on and in: The Process of Searching for and Selecting an Aged Care Facility. Qualitative Health Research. 11(2), pp.221-237.

Dyer, Suzanne M, Enwu Liu, Emmanuel S et al. 2018. Clustered domestic residential aged care in Australia: fewer hospitalisations and better quality of life. The Medical Journal of Australia. 208(10), pp.433-438.

Mendelson, Aaron, Karli Kondo, Cheryl Damberg et al. 2017. The Effects of Pay-for-Performance Programs on Health, Health Care Use, and Processes of Care: A Systematic Review. Annals of Internal Medicine., pp.341-353.