What are Malcolm's aspirations for a comfortable end of life?

Today Malcolm Turnbull tell us that aged care workers should aspire to a better job. Now, I’m a registered nurse in a public aged care facility. I am pretty bloody well paid. I love my job, and I have no aspirations to do something else. But I know that all of the personal care workers beneath me get paid crap. Many of them have done the job for 30-40 years. They are absolutely dedicated to their work.

Did Malcolm perhaps wonder if maybe we should pay the people caring for our elderly a little bit better instead? Who does he think might do the rather important and incredibly challenging job that they do if they all just aspired to a better job? It’s like he’s taken the ridiculous idea of trickle down economics and applied it upside down to an essential service.

Aged care seems to regularly come in for a hiding. A few years ago, there was a meme going around that our prisoners were better treated than our elderly. Now, I don’t think we should mistreat prisoners. Hell, I don’t think we should lock up most offenders at all. But it was a preposterous slur on the dedicated care that many facilities and the staff working there provide to our elderly. Many of our personal care workers are given responsibility way beyond what their training and remuneration really accounts for. And they do the best job they can because they are devoted to doing so, with staff to resident ratios that are frequently marginal.

Many nurses also begrudge aged care. Throughout my course, student nurses were focused on all the “exciting” areas of nursing. Acute care, emergency departments, theatre. Aged care is the lowest of the low. I think it’s massively underrated. A good aged care nurse is a project manager, a mini-VMO and a counsellor as well as a nurse.  We have the opportunity to really know our residents and their families. We have the opportunity to make the remainder of their lives as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. We have the opportunity to make their deaths as good as possible.

Most of us will grow old. If we end up requiring care, do we want our carers to be respected and rewarded for the work they do? Or just using it as a fill in to a “better” job?  If all carers were just using it as a bridge to “better” work, how would they develop the experience and skills to provide high quality care?

But just as when Malcolm was carrying on about penalty rates, he doesn’t care if we are looking after our society’s elderly at 3am, and he doesn’t care if we have appropriately skilled and remunerated staff. That’s not his world. Unfortunately for him, he’s got 20 odd years on me, so it will actually be his world a lot sooner then he might like to think.