Residents of BaptistCare Macquarie Park are taken for a ride throughout the grounds of Macquarie University by John Kelman,who runs the nonprofit Cycling Without Age.James BrickwoodBay Warburton,executive director of community services at Wesley Mission,said the organisation had to stop providing home care packages because it couldn’t find staff to meet the demand.
“We say[to the elderly] we can’t take you on because we can’t provide the level of service we’d like to,” Warburton said. “We just don’t have the workers,and we have to wait until the workforce grows,or we can find those people who are willing to take on the hard shifts,” Warburton said.
A mismatch between where care workers live and where care is needed is largely driven by the lack of housing affordability in dearer regions such as northern Sydney and the eastern suburbs,whichprevents carers from living close to where they work.
Chatswood local and avid cyclist John Kelman runs the nonprofit Cycling Without Age,and said demand to enrol in the program,which takes elderly people from aged care homes on trishaw rides across the city,has surged.
“Northern Sydney is getting older and the demand for care services is certainly increasing,” he said.
Beyond increased demand for aged-care adjacent services such as the one he operates,Kelman,while cycling on his usual routes,has also noticed more aged care homes being built,which he said has “increased notably over the years”.
Estelle Grech,policy manager at the Committee for Sydney has called for a citywide affordable housing strategy to alleviate some of the demand for services.
“We are having problems today – but if we don’t do anything about it,anyone who’s in their 60s right now and lives in these suburbs will have issues when they need aged care later,” she said.
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