Spare a thought this Christmas for the hundreds of elderly in our district who desperately need access to long-term, bed-based care but who simply can’t access it.
Two months ago I wrote about the dangerous shortage of care beds for elderly across our region. I suggested that the Ministry of Health should look at some ‘outside the box’ solutions to address this.
One of these was a series of ‘construction partnerships’ between central government and aged care providers. Government would fund construction, with aged care providers like ourselves providing the actual service. In other words: “you build it, we’ll run it”.
This month I’d like to throw another Third Party into the mix. The three District Councils that have influence over what happens – and doesn’t happen – in our region; Far North, Kaipara and Whangarei.
If local government continues to encourage retirement accommodation providers to set up camp here, then that must come with the demand that they also build bed-care facilities with an appropriate number of beds.
District Plans must be updated to compel the provision of bed-based aged-care facilities by retirement accommodation providers. And Resource Consents need to be made dependent on those requirements being met. We cannot keep bringing elderly people into our communities without expanding the infrastructure required to care for them when, inevitably, they become ill, frail and unable to look after themselves.
We have 66 beds in our Care unit at Kerikeri Retirement Village; 21 in the ‘rest home’ wing, 30 in hospital care and 15 in dementia care. We have a waiting list of over 80 people across all levels, some of them urgent. We can’t keep up.
Theoretically, these should be for those of our residents who need them. But the reality is that we are the only provider of long-term, bed-based care in the Mid-North. And one of only a handful of such providers in the whole of Northland. With our 15 dementia beds. It’s a ridiculous situation for a community-led charitable organisation like ours to be in.
Worryingly, we’ve heard reports of big, commercial retirement accommodation providers not a million miles from here reassuring prospective residents that if they need care beds they can access ours. This won’t be the case in the very near future as we meet the needs of our residents first.
This seemingly universal reliance on Kerikeri Retirement Village’s care facilities has to change. We absolutely need Councils to hear the message that their help is needed to create change that supports our local communities, not shareholder dividends. And then we need them to act on that message.
