The Guardian 5 March, 2008
Interview with Rebecca:
The harsh reality of age care workers
I’ve been working in age care for ten years — low level age care facilities, retirement villages.
Your duties involve pretty much everything — day to day duties of caring for residents of different and varying dependencies.
You are assisting with medications, showering, you pretty much do everything in getting a person up and ready and attend to their whole daily living requirements.
It involves everything pretty much.
It is quite a physical and emotionally demanding job because you’re dealing with behaviours as well as the physical needs, meaning dementias and just the fact that people are feeling depressed.
The whole ageing process is the loss of independence and so there is a lot of emotional work that goes along with the counselling of being an age carer.
It is keeping their spirits up when they are gradually losing their independence and they are feeling like they are a burden and so they withdraw and that’s the whole emotional side of ageing that puts a lot of emotional stress and strain on the carer.
It is often you are the person that sees them more than their family and more than anyone else. You see them daily and more than once a day — it’s three, four, five times a day. You are their main contact and so they become very dependent on you.
I just walked straight in ten years ago off the street and had no experience in the job. But as a requirement of age care facilities’ accreditation they have to provide training in those sorts of areas — emotional dependence, etc.
The working hours can be long, all different shifts. It is shift work mainly so there are night shifts involved, there are afternoon shifts. It is the whole daily cycle of getting a person up, getting them dressed, fed, medicated, stimulated mentally and physically. You do mobility exercises; you are trained to provide those sorts of things.
It’s the whole range from the time they are up to the time they are in bed and then the full service supervision of people that need supervising in their sleep. It never stops. The cycle just keeps on going.
The people are dependent on you pretty much most of the time, the high care ones particularly dependent on you 24 hours a day.
The meals are usually regenerated meals, like a hospital kind of setting where the meals are cooked by the cooks or in bulk and then the carers serve them and regenerate them in smaller dining room sittings. It’s a home-like environment; as home-like an environment as what they can get.
It is a very rushed kind of system where there’s usually only one or two carers for twenty or so people and you’ve got to attend to all their different dietary needs and yes, it’s quite a demanding job.
Carers’ average age is around 50; it’s an older person’s job usually and it’s predominantly women that do the work. There are a lot of people from non-English speaking backgrounds because the conditions and wages are so low not a lot of people want to do the work so it’s usually people who are new to the country that do the work.
It can be quite confronting for the residents. The residents have their own history and many of this generation that are in age care facilities have been through the wars and so they have their own ideas on different cultures and so it is not an easy job. I’d say a lot of workers from non-English speaking backgrounds get quite a lot of abuse from residents that are dementing, who still think they are in the war and they see, say, an Asian person as an enemy.
I remember a woman being insulted because a man who had been in Changi just lashed out at this woman because she was of Asian appearance.
There are a lot of violent behaviours that are considered as part of a job. There is no real training to deal with that sort of behaviour and there are no real systems in place, safety systems to prevent that sort of thing.
There was quite a scary scenario. I knew another carer, an older woman. She said "I’ve got to go and attend to a resident, I don’t think he’s taking his medication." And he was diagnosed with bipolar and she said, just an off-hand remark, "Look, if I press the alarm can you come down and see if I’m okay."
I saw the alarm go off and I went down there and he had her bailed up in a corner and was standing over her and was yelling at her to get out because they were going to stab him and he thought that he was protecting her but he was being very threatening to her.
When I turned up on the scene he rounded on me and I didn’t have any panic button. The only thing I had was my own alarm and because we were the people responsible no one else was to attend to those alarms, so no one else came looking for us. They just thought that it was the alarm we were attending to. It took quite a bit of manoeuvring to get away from that person and she ended up with a couple of scratches on her. I got away without any physical injury but I was very shook up and it really scared me for a long time.
I don’t think they recognise the valuable work that carers do. I think it’s the forgotten health sector. I just don’t think it has been on the radar.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s a predominantly female-based industry and the fact that the wages and the conditions are so low. It’s a reflection on society in the whole how the work that women do, and do so really well, is not recognised. That caring role is expected of women more so than men. I think that if there were more men in the industry the conditions and the wages would be a lot better.
There are not many people in the union. I don’t think they really know what’s out there. I think they are used to just being hit on the head for so long that they feel disempowered and they don’t actually think that they can make a difference because the problem is so big and wide spread.
I think that they don’t feel that there is any hope of any change.
The nurses and health services union cover carers. I do believe that nurses are running a campaign on workloads and try to get some sort of equity with the public hospital system. The patient-staff ratio is something that they are working on.
I think the women’s movement has gone to sleep. I don’t want to be too critical … It had gained momentum for quite a few years but I think it has plateaued. I think it is time to really ramp up the next stage because I don’t see the women’s movement as gaining everything that it necessarily wanted when it first started.
There is such a long way to go — just with paid maternity leave. When you look at where Australia is compared to the rest of the world, if the UK can offer 12 weeks paid maternity leave to every woman I don’t see why we couldn’t. There are other developed countries out there that are offering paid maternity leave and it still has not arrived in this country. And I think this should be one of the next things that should be addressed by the women’s movement.
Also the disparity in wages between industries with predominantly women workers like the age care industry and nursing. Other industries like the manufacturing and building industries — you just look at the disparities in wages.
It’s a joke really and working at the coal face when you are dealing with physically and emotionally demanding people on a day-in-day-out basis it is a very physically and emotionally demanding job that is just not recognised.