Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support this private member’s motion today. I congratulate the member for Melbourne for putting it up, and I also thank the member for Canning for acknowledging my ongoing contribution to trying to resolve this issue within our party rooms. When I was first elected seven years ago there was a young lady who was most distressed because her husband had a serious acquired brain injury and was in a nursing home. She was divorced or separated from that gentleman and she was unable to care for him because of the difficulties his injury had inflicted. She came to me needing some sort of assistance because the nursing home had decided that he had to come home. She had two little children. There was no way she could cope with what was going to be required on a 24-hour, seven days a week basis. It was then that I felt absolutely helpless and hopeless because I had no answers for her. There was nowhere for her former husband to go other than into a nursing home. She had enormous guilt as well about this issue.

I have been commenting on this, trying to get it resolved and working with various ministers ever since to try to get some sort of answer. As our advanced technology saves lives that maybe would not have been saved many years ago due to the lack of technology, we are now finding ourselves with an ever-burgeoning problem for families and those afflicted with illness and also acquired brain injury syndrome. This is not going to go away; it is just going to get bigger and bigger. As our technology advances, we are saving lives—that is fantastic—but we also have some very critical care needs as a result. So we as a nation have to take responsibility. It is not a state issue and it is not a federal issue; it is an Australian issue. It is an issue for all Australian people.

We now have around 100 people under 60 in nursing homes with multiple sclerosis. They may have really well-tuned, snappy, sharp minds and are alert, but their bodies have unfortunately been inflicted with multiple sclerosis. Families are unable to care for their needs on a 24-hour basis due to work and family requirements and they find that there is nowhere for them to go. There are another 300 or so at risk of entering nursing homes on any given day because of the lack of support services. It is predicted that there will be around 10,000 young people in nursing homes by 2007 if the current rate of entry is maintained.

So there is a definite need for collaboration between the states and the Commonwealth, but it has to be meaningful—we have to have actual answers. There is a critical need for co-location of facilities. At the moment there are many. It is quite appropriate that the services that are provided in an aged-care facility might be extended to those young people in nursing homes, but they should be in a stand-alone facility.

Aged-care providers should have a pool of funding that they can apply for to build stand-alone facilities, but they should be able to co-locate those to utilise the medical supervision that is required for some young people in nursing homes. In that way we can adequately cope with a reducing workforce. But those stand-alone facilities should have separate entries and separate rehab and care programs that are specifically designed for young people and that are geared towards assisting them into supported accommodation programs. We must urgently provide accommodation options. Working as a team with the states is imperative. (Time expired)

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