Launching the FACES campaign | Melissa Reader | Club Sandwich

Club Sandwich is recorded on Gadigal land, home of the EORA nation. We pay our respects to elders past and present. Always was, always will be.

Special drop.

We are getting political. We're getting a little bit fierce and fired up about this, Sarah. So, like I'm so excited to be doing a special drop with you, but I'm bringing a little bit of that fire in the belly.

What's happening? So I have been doing a whole range of calls in the last couple of weeks, probably over a hundred, and it's just brought to the very kind of front of my mind how hard it is for families out there at the moment for the sandwich generation, and how many people are stuck in a queue. So you can imagine you've done all the legwork and the paperwork, you've got your elderly mum registered for my aged care. You get the letter, you think, great, finally. That letter is only telling you your mum is approved. That letter then goes on to tell you the funding isn't released yet. Who knows when it'll be released? You'll get another letter to tell you that. So there is this enormous group of people, families stuck in that queue. The Sandwich Jenners are the one filling all of those gaps that the funded care is there to provide and their elderly parents need and deserve the care. They've been approved for it and they're not getting it.

Well, the thing that's really clear, and this has happened in the last two weeks, we had the outgoing Inspector General do a bit of a fired up address at the press club and we had some interesting commentary back from the Federal Health Minister. There's just no single transparent count of that queue. It's reported in four different ways. It's almost like it's designed to be slippery.

That's right. And these numbers that the public have, they're so variable, they range from like 100,000 to 200,000. So one thing we think is really important is one honest count, one honest number. So at least as a community we know where things are because you can't understand and track what you don't measure. So that's really important. But there's also a really worrying figure behind it, Sarah, and that is the number of Australians who are dying each year before that package gets released. Now, do we know that number? We do, because one of the senators happened to ask the right question in the right room a year ago. But that is not reported formally and with any kind of transparency. So last year, 4812 Australians died waiting for the funding that they were approved for and they needed and they deserved. So listen, what other social issues happen in this country at that magnitude? That is 13 people a day. You know, you think about shark deaths now that is a horrific event, but we see two to three deaths a year. And you think about the investment in the community behind the prevention of those

debate and the media storm.

This is a magnitude 1800 times bigger than that and it is invisible and it's silent and it is being borne by the families of those elderly parents. So it seems awfully unfair.

enough providers or what we've got really stretched providers. But this is not a critique of providers. Cause they are doing the very best they can in a really constrained system. This is really quite simple. It's an honest. Ask to government for an honest count. What we're going to do is take a submission to the senate inquiry on 31 July to ask for an honest count of those numbers. Now we really want the families, the community, the, the club sandwich community behind us. And we've just launched a campaign called Faces. You can see this at Vera Guide Faces. And it is asking everyone who is in this queue, or has been in this queue or is really worried about this queue, to put your name and face to the problem. It's really simple. It takes about two minutes. But please get in, put your name in, share it with everyone that you know is going through it and be part of our Senate Commission inquiry submission at the end of the month.

That's right.

I've had many phone calls in the last few weeks. Really distressed families with 90 year old parents. They've got nowhere to go because they haven't got funding released to be able to go at home. Even though they might have a level 8 package approved, they haven't got the funds yet and there's no residential beds for them. So it's really upsetting. I think we deserve an honest number, an honest count, because you cannot track what you cannot see. And I think, Sarah, when there are multiple versions of these numbers, it does allow for some slippery headlines that can pull on one or two of those numbers to present things in a different way. So it's an accountability ask and a transparency ask. Let's get behind it.

Absolutely.

This is a long, arduous, tedious time.

But if you get in early, if

Cause that cue is real and it's getting quite. We want to know the genuine number in it, but you've got to get in that queue. It's a really tedious system.

What do you cue for toilets,

care, health shampers at a gig.

Vera Guide Faces. You're gonna see some media out there about this. You'll see lots on socials. Please get behind it, share it, send it to the people that need to be part of it too.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, none of us want our parents to be one of those 5,000. And I might add, that number is only trending in one direction as the population ages. So we've gotta get some clarity and some accountability behind these numbers really quickly.

If you've just listened to that and you've thought, that's my family too, we're in that queue. This is where you go. It's called Faces. It's a family led campaign asking for one honest count of the number of people waiting for their aged care funding and the people who die while they're waiting. Add your name at Vera Guide Faces. It'll just take you a minute. It's super simple and nothing appears be to anywhere else without your say so. They call it policy, we call it family. Join us and put a face to the Waze.