Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 8:01:04 to 8:04:18
The segment concludes with a discussion on the costs of 'stranded' older patients in hospitals and the administrative burden of compliance for aged care providers, specifically regarding the My Aged Care system.
Topics: Health, Infrastructure
Speakers: Prof Michael Pervan, Senator The Hon Anne Ruston
Okay, cool. Can I just actually ask you? Um Senator Gatenby asked before around um stranded patients, and the states and territories have been making some calls in relation to the cost of those stranded patients in their hospitals and given you're the hospital man too. Are the figures that have been quoted by the states and territories of their cost of a typical stranded patient? Is that correct? And what is your view about what the cost of a typical stranded patient and uh older patient in a hospital?
It's a much bigger question than you think, Senator. Um I've got some perspective on that, having run a few hospitals, including Tasmania. Um the cost of them really relate to the patient themselves. You can make some sweeping generalizations about the costs of maintenance care, and that's about 1200 to 1500 a day. Um but once again, these patients aren't stranded for no reason, and increasingly it's not as simple as a lack of residential care places for them to go to. Um that's certainly an element, I'm not disagreeing with that. But for many of them, and it has come up and um uh it's come up in the discussion today, their needs are complex to the extent where um residential care can't immediately take them. There are programs like transition care uh which provide six weeks support to to move people on to their um home or uh residential care. Um, but there are an increasing number of patients for whom that's not sufficient, and it's not just dementia, and it's not just um what you could categorize as antisocial behaviours, smoking, particular mental disorders, borderline personality disorder, and so on. Um it can be that the patient has multiple chronic conditions, uh something that is a particular issue in Tasmania, and they actually require a lot of health care support, and so we we don't quite have a model that will support those sorts of patients yet in other countries. Um Senator Roberts was referring to step-down care. Um that's not where it's gone elsewhere. It's gone into um skilled nursing facilities that provide support for these people with complex ongoing needs. We have a certainly large number of them, but we don't have enough of them in any one location to make a facility viable. So we're still exploring all of that.
So I mean hypothetical, and you don't have to answer it obviously if you don't want to, but you know, in your um professional judgment, um, is the cost of keeping people in a hospital setting uh likely to be on average more expensive than putting them into a facility that is designed appropriately for their needs? You don't have to answer that if you don't want to. I know it's a lead-in question.
Thank you, Senator. Uh it's it's a more complex question than I can answer in the time we've got.