The first national count of Australia's 'sandwich generation' | Stand Up and Be Counted with Melissa Reader | Club Sandwich
How many people are in the sandwich generation? Until today, nobody knew.
The number: 2.43 million people aged 35–70 currently help or care for an ageing parent. This number is expected to rise to over 6 million within 10 years.
In this episode, Sarah Macdonald is joined by Melissa Reader (CEO of Vera and Commissioning Editor of Club Sandwich) to discuss Vera's new, nationally representative research conducted in partnership with YouGov. They explain why this group has been missing from major reports, and explore knock-on effects for carers' work and finances.
"People often aren't counting themselves," says Sarah. "They're not counting the labour of love they do as labour; they're seeing it as love. But if you can get help in that labour, then you've got more time to love."
Ageing parents? You've got them. We've got you.
Vera is your candid companion as you care for an ageing parent. Have a look at https://vera.guide.
FACES (Families for Aged Care Equity and Support) is 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.
Put The Kettle On — Vera's free conversation guide: the five questions worth asking your ageing mum or dad, at putthekettleon.com.au
Credits:
Sarah Macdonald – Host + Executive Producer
Melissa Reader – Commissioning Editor, Executive Producer + Clubber
Justin McArthur – Executive Producer + Editor, for P. Zinner Podcasts (https://pzinner.com.au)
Thanks and kudos to Sean Wayland for our theme music Club Sandwich — hear more at https://seanwayland.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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.
Club Sandwich is brought to you by Vera. When things change with an ageing parent, it can be hard to know what to do first. Vera helps you understand the options and work out your next step. Start at Vera Guide. Hello, welcome to Club Sandwich. Now, this is a podcast for you if you often feel that all of the things you do is invisible labour. And it is, because guess what? We haven't really seen the Sandwich generation in all their glory, in the statistics and the reports to government and the media and about those who look after their aging parents while trying to juggle the rest of life. My name is Sarah McDonald. I've been doing this for 15 years and sometimes I'm standing up in queues for my mum, sometimes I'm lying down in the fetal position with her, sometimes I am just sitting down trying to catch my breath from everything that's going on. And we know you are too. So what we've done is we've asked you to stand up and be counted. And today, the results of some research that Vera has done where you are counted and seen and heard. The CEO of Vera and the commissioning editor of the podcast is Melissa Reeder. Hello.
Hi, Sarah. I mean, let's face it, the Sandwich generation have been standing up for years. Yeah, but they haven't been counted.
Yeah, our feet are sore, our legs
are exhausted, but now we are counted. And that's a really big step in this country. Massive, because it is a huge number of people that have just really gone under the radar and they know that they feel invisible, they feel quite silent in the work that they're doing. But we couldn't find any evidence of that number being properly accounted for. So we've done the work.
It's interesting because a big longitudinal report that the government does just got released, the intergenerational Report. Intergenerational report. And that didn't even identify the Sandwich generation.
No, I mean, it's an interesting report. It's. In some ways you could read it as a convenient political distraction because most of the report is focused on what's going to happen in 40 years time. You know, a lot of it's talking about what our population will look like by 2060. Now that is important. But I tell you what, for anyone listening to this podcast today, what's going to happen in the next three, five and 10 years is far more important, but probably a little bit more difficult for the politicians to articulate and act upon. So we, we value the intergenerational report. We talk about it in the research that we've delivered. But we are bringing the country back to now, back to what the sandwich generation are doing today, tomorrow, next year and for the years after. We're putting a number around it and we've found some really interesting things that we're going to talk through on today's podcast.
All right, let's have a drum roll. How many people are in the sandwich generation?
So today, across Australia between the ages of 35 and 70, there are 2.43 million people in the sandwich generation. Now that is a much bigger number than even you or I thought. I've been doing this work for nearly 10 years. I knew it would be a lot bigger than the dusty numbers that were floating around, but I didn't think it'd be that big. So it is just wonderful to have that figure on the table. And we've been really careful about how we've defined it because again, the numbers that have been used, they're really using pretty outdated definitions of what modern families look like. You don't have to have a kid to be in the sandwich generation. You may well have kids, you may well care for someone else's kids, but you are in the Sandwich generation if you are between 35 and 70 and you are doing at least one of six things that we've defined as help or care for a parent and you are managing all the layers of life and taking on those increasing needs of aging parents. If you meet that criteria, you're in it. We've done this. It's statistically valid research at a national level and that is a really big number. And wait till we get to the forecast figure.
Yes, because it's. There'll be more people joining the sandwich
club in years to come. In years, there will be over 6 million people in the sandwich generation. Now, sometimes, Sarah, numbers can feel a little bit abstract. So I think we should help our listeners think about what 2.43 million really looks like. That is the city of Perth.
Wow.
That is filling the MCG 24 times of 100,000 seats. That is actually 38 times the size of the Australian full time Defence Force.
And it's an army of its own. It's this invisible, silent, caring army.
It's half the population of New Zealand.
What?
How did a community of that size not be recognised until this research? So we've dropped it in carers week because that makes some kind of sense to bring that to the community in the week where we are talking about caring and caregiving. But this is a really big number, guys. We're so thrilled to be able to bring it to you. We want you to tap everybody and share the number with them. And we're going to do a lot of hard work now with that number two. Make you a lot more visible.
That's right. Because every time we try and talk about this in the media, people ask us how many there are and we can never exactly tell them.
Yeah, you're ABC Compass episodes, Sarah. I think we had to use 1.5.
Yes. Because we were counting the number of carers and then going, well, how many of them are the SAP caring for parents as opposed to kids or all of those sort of things? So we've always estimated. Yeah.
When you count carers, you're counting all acts of care. This is a much more specific part of it. And also, as we'll talk about a little bit later, not all of us would think we were a carer.
Well, that's right. And we'll get to that. But yeah, 2.43 is a lot of people. And for a group of people to have any sort of power within a system, they need to be counted and they need to be seen. And at the moment, because we do often, we're so busy, we feel invisible. We're not seen. So hopefully that can have some force when we get this in front of the people that matter.
Gonna make it my work to make that the case. That's my job.
Okay. All right. Well, full steam ahead with that job. But yeah, I love the fact that people are finally being countered when they haven't been seen before. But the big problem of this is that often, and this is why we're often not coming up in carers surveys, is that people in the sandwich generation don't see themselves as carers. And I've done this. I still don't. I mean, to be we. I don't say, yes, I'm a carer.
Yes, I know, it's a weird term. It feels a bit. Doesn't it feel a bit outdated?
I mean, I don't know what else we call it, really.
Yeah.
I mean, you kind of. Well, maybe you're just a daughter or
a son or a son or a sister or brother, just doing the work that needs to be done in a family, but I don't.
That's just what we do. That's just what we do.
Just what we do. And interestingly, when we look at the research more than half of people in the sandwich generation. They just don't think of themselves as carers.
Right. That's what this founder is worth.
They just don't self identify with that word. So what that means is a lot of those services out there that are designed and they're really valuable services, we don't see them, we don't associate with them, we don't think that they're for us because they're called the carer gateway or the carer payment. You know, if you don't think of yourself as a carer, you're not going to be reading that post. Accessing care.
Exactly. That will help you. Yeah, that's so true. You get so overwhelmed and you think, I'm just doing this all alone and no one's helping me. And you don't realise that there are actually services for you that can help you.
Nobody bestows you that title. Sarah, on a particular Tuesday to say, now that you've taken your mum to her seventh medical appointment, you are now formally a carer.
Congratulations. You have joined the sandwich club. Yeah, yeah.
Doesn't happen that way.
No more nightclubs, you're in the sandwich club.
It's really incremental. Like I've said before when we've talked, aging happens slowly and then it can happen really, really fast and it's quite incremental. And you just don't wake up one day and say, oh, I think I'm a carer of an aging parent. No, life doesn't work that way.
But also because, yes, it does go slowly and it slowly increments. But then when you said it goes fast, there'll be a disaster in terms of a medical episode or something like that, and you kindly find yourself in
it, in that hospital corner and you're
dropped into it and you're like, I haven't had time to think about what I'm doing right now. I'm just doing it.
Exactly. There'll be a fall or a diagnosis or a hospitalisation or maybe a death. And that will kind of, you know, quantum leap you into the space that is, you know, caregiving. But there's a lot of work that happens before that moment.
Yeah. And that's the squish.
Yeah.
That is the center of that. Yes. And the other thing that we did is we counted you, even if you don't have a child, because a lot of people think to be in the sandwich, you have to have a child. But we're talking about layers of life. It may not include children.
I just think that's an old definition. It's not a contemporary view of modern family life. And so we were really committed to making sure the way that we did this research actually accounted for the way that families are shaped today. And, you know, I said this on the, on the bonus drop, but I know there's going to be number nerds listening, wanting to dive into the methodology. It is all there. We will give you the link to where you can read the research. You will find all that gritty detail of how we counted you of the genuine research methodology. There's a lot there to digest.
Okay.
Do you know, one of the really interesting insights that came out of this is, I think we've got an assumption that this kind of family dynamic where you're doing all of this work in the sandwich kind of peaks in your 50s. Actually, what we found, Sarah, is that it is. It is as common at 38 as it is at 68. And when you look at the variance, there's just nothing, you know, significant about the variance between 38, 48, 58 or 68.
So, yeah, because you looked at the number of people in each age group and divided it into different age groups
who are in the sandwich generation. And it's pretty much a flat line, which I thought was so interesting. So it means there are much younger people doing this. People in their 30s and 40s, in their 40s and 50s, and in their 60s and 70s. But doesn't life look different in each of those chapters? And it made me think a lot about how challenging in very different ways this would be in your 30s or 40s, where you're probably not as senior in your work. You're probably, you know, trying to build yourself into a position of seniority. You've got younger kids, you've probably got a higher mortgage.
Yeah.
You know, it's probably a newer mortgage. You're really feeling the bearing down of that interest rate. Exactly.
Huge pressures. Exactly.
And then you think about how that kind of shifts and transforms over your 40s and 50s, where your kids are older. Anyone that's got teenagers or 20 year olds knows it's not necessarily easier. It's just a different kind of difficult and delightful, but difficult. But, you know, as you move in your 50s and 60s, maybe you have a mindset that you're okay with working more flexibly or you've got more seniority to ask for it, but that comes with its own issues because once you step back or step out of the workforce in your 50s and 60s, it can be bloody hard to get back in I know.
Unicorn. Yeah. It's a miracle. That's what I was thinking. That's so true. Because you're scared of dropping out, you're scared of taking more time out to look after Mum. And I guess it correlates to when people had children. So when your parents had children. So if your parents had you when you were young, you're probably in the peak of this when you're in your 30s or 40s, if they had you a bit older, it might be your 40s or 50s or even 60s. But what astounded me was the older age group. They're still 20% or so of people who are. What was it, 65 to 75, looking after their parents?
35 to 70 was the band.
Yes. Oh, till 70. Okay.
So 60% of that group. And doesn't that talk to you about longevity and people living longer, living well into their 90s, and those needs get higher then.
That's right. So you might be doing this at a point where you're starting to think very much about your own ageing and your own needs and looking after yourself, and you're still looking after a parent who will have. If they'll be much older. I mean, if you're 70, your mother's gonna be.
Or father's gonna be in their 90s.
In their 90s, yeah. So their needs are much more complex.
Yep.
I mean, I've got a friend of my mum's, her daughter has moved her mother in with her and up a steep flight of stairs. So the mum can't really go anywhere and she's in the 70s and the mother's 95. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, that's so much. Yeah.
Also, like, just the prevalence of dementia.
Absolutely.
And the combination of dementia and frailty, that looks really different in your 90s. And it really does limit you in your life and in your life choices in your 60s and 70s, when you're wanting to.
Yeah. Be on that cruise or something.
Get that camper van and do the Grey Nomad and all those things that we know people love to do in kind of retirement. But it was such an interesting. And I haven't seen that anywhere before, that it is as consistent through the bans of 35%. Yeah.
So it's not the same people who are going 35 to 75. It's about when people come in and out of this phase of their life. So it might happen to you in your 30s or your 40s or your 50s or your 60s, but it's happening
as much to people in their 30s and 40s as it is to people in their 50s.
And it's going on for 12. 13. 12 is the average, right?
Yeah, that's right. And of course, the number is growing. What about what we found around work?
Let's talk about work. Yeah.
So more than half of working Australians in the sandwich generation are using their own leave to manage this. Now, this is super interesting because what that means is it's not necessarily showing up in a performance review, but it means that you are sacrificing your own annual leave, which is meant for you to rebuild and restore and have some time away from work and have with your family. You're using that to manage the care
of your ageing parent because the carer's leave's not enough.
Or maybe it's too hard to ask for other types of leave that is mine.
I suspect there's a mixture of those two things, actually.
Yeah. It might be easier to take every Friday off for four weeks as annual leave. You might get a few less questions, put it that way.
Yes. For people who are in workplaces that may not see this work as important
to be doing, that might not have enough awareness or recognition around this idea of parenting as they do for parenting.
Or if you don't own your job, you don't feel secure in your job. And let's face it, at this day and age, a lot of people don't.
That's right.
So they're using their own leave.
They're using their own annual leave to do it. And a third, A third of people that we surveyed say, this is absolutely affecting my career progression, which is not surprising. But a third is about to go to big number. I know, but a third is a big number.
It is a big number. Do you think workplaces are aware of that?
I think they're increasingly aware of it. But like leave a cruise again next year, Right. A promotion that didn't happen doesn't. Okay. You miss that promotion, you miss that career opportunity. We all know what that dynamic can look like. So they're two different things, but they are definitely affecting the sandwich generation. When did you last take annual leave for an actual holiday? Sarah McDonald.
I haven't had any leave for the last year. Hang on. Club sandwich. And we haven't had leave, either of us.
I'm just thinking we are not a shining example. Or maybe we are truly representative of what the research has found because you
live this patchwork life where you try and fit in so many things in your day, then it bleeds into your weekends. Cause you think, oh well, I left work early on that day to do that and I saw mum on the way to work and went in late. And so you're always kind of playing catch up, I think with your work life.
Often, always. And a lot of the families that I talk to through the work at Vera, they almost feel like they have to put their parent into respite care to be able to go away and feel that their mum or dad is gonna be okay. And they should, and they should. But it is not easy. That is a process in itself about the parents willingness and just the availability. So there's a lot of stuff that makes that really, really hard. But to all the employers out there, sympathy is not a policy. So you need to be looking at your sandwich generation work cohort and thinking about your policies, how they apply to your 38 year olds equally right through to your 68 year olds and think about what those cohort, what they need so that you're going to retain them. They need recognition and support and flexibility and they need to be seen that they are doing this work.
Yeah, when you said sympathy is not a policy, I just saw like a manager going, oh, that's really hard, but get that report on my desk by Monday.
Yeah, I'm sorry that that happened to you last night, but yeah, this is due yesterday. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
And particularly with those who may have children with disabilities and things like that, they can get crunched in both directions completely. And this is where they take their leave, possibly to look after a parent secretly because they're already worried about taking leave for a child.
Exactly, perhaps exact leave a lot of room for their own wellbeing, downtime recovery, which is what annual leave is designed to do.
I used to say to my kids when they were little, okay, you get one doona day, a term where you stay home, stay in your pyjamas, stand at the doona. We need to take a club sandwich.
We should have an annual club sandwich doona day. Just make a note of that. That is something that we should do.
Take it for yourself. Tell your parent you're at work, tell your work you're with your parents.
Do whatever is necessary, make sure.
I'm not gonna forget that and take a duna day just to kind of reset the nervous system as well.
Once you and I get an idea in our heads, we're pretty good at making it.
We could do the whole podcast that day in our pajamas.
I mean, I actually love working from my bed in the morning so I don't have to get up and rush. My husband thinks I'm mad.
Yeah.
But it is so comforting to just take that day a little bit more slowly.
Yeah, I love it. A quick word from our sponsor, Vera. Your parent has been approved for support at home, but the funding hasn't been released. The help's still needed and it's you left working out how to get the care started while you wait. You shouldn't have to carry that gap alone. Vera explains ways to fund care while approved supported home funding is pending with the costs and the trade off in plain English. Vera also helps you and your parent work out the support they want and find a provider for eligible families. Care can start in 10 days, depending on the care needs and the provider availability. Take the next step at Vera Guide care. Now, back to our conversation. Let's talk about the plan that people have or don't have, because you asked this in the survey too, with the research company.
And this is actually really important to us at Vera because we're trying to build tools that help families plan for this whole season of life, as we always say, at the kitchen table, not in the hospital corridor. So we ask people in the sandwich generation, do they have a plan for what this will look like and do they know where to get help? One in four have any semblance of a plan or the knowledge of where they're going to get help. One in four? That's pretty. That's pretty terrible, Sarah. I mean, if you asked a new parent that or a pregnant mother that they'd give you a much more robust answer.
I would have thought, yeah, people will have life plans. Yeah.
Retirement plans or job plans.
Retirement plans, but parent plan, because it's hard, because you can't do it yourself. You have to do it with the
parent, with your parent. Which comes back to all the work that Katherine Mannix has done with us about the ability and the willingness to open up some of those conversations that don't have to be too scary to start with. It can just be, mum, what does a good day look like for you? And then you can unpack a lot of other things behind it. But one in four have any kind of plan or no way to get help. So we've got to change that.
That's what we're trying to. Vera.
Yeah.
So you can listen back also to the episode we did with Kerri. This put the kettle on, where we modeled the conversation you can have with the parent. And then Jo Lambe analysed The conversation. And even Kerry, who had been through all this with her mum, Kerri said,
I'm probably like, won't be very good for this interview because I'm so organised. God lover.
And then she was like, oh, I haven't done that.
Yeah, and I'm probably not old enough to have to do that, am I? And then you said to her, well, you're in your 70s, you know, it's
good to talk about these things this stuff's confronting and it's really tricky to do. And so that is why I understand that there's no plan and often there's things you can't plan for, there's contingencies you can't plan for. Of course, there's certain documents you need, there's things you need to do and we've talked about that in other episodes, things such as the enduring power of attorney and all of that stuff.
Sarah.
But documents.
But the years before a parent needs help, that's the window for the family to make these decisions without a deadline, without a crisis, without all of that stress and emotion. So that is the window before parents need help. That is when you need to have the conversations, it's when you need to get into the my aged care system. Because when you do need that help, you've got things lined up super important and a really kind of confronting but helpful number to have, you know, 1 in 4, which means 3 in 4 have no plan and don't know where to go for help.
Gosh, nowhere to go for help. That was the other thing. Because if they're not seeing their self as carers, they don't see organisations such as carers and Australia as there for them. So they're not getting the help, they're not accessing the system. And even though the system does rely on you, the sandwich generation, to hold the whole thing up, if you're not making use of the system, you're flailing and being crushed by all the layers of responsibility.
Yeah, and in the report we had Natalie Siegel Brown on, didn't we, a couple of weeks ago, who was the former Inspector General of aged care and just an all round awesome woman. And she has contributed to the report and she's talked about, you know, this is actually like a design question now, because we know the number and the system has to recognise the volume of work that is being done and the parts of the system that are being frankly held up, supported, made possible by the work of the sandwich generation. Now, it's a design question, what are we going to do for that group to make this possible.
Yeah. How to incorporate them, how to be the. The system should be our ally and not our enemy. And often it feels like it is the enemy. So you just don't bother. You just don't bother. You just go, this is too hard. I give up. Yeah, I did that for.
I'm exhausted. I've made eight phone calls. I've got nowhere.
I'll just do it myself. It's easier just to do it myself
or I'll do it later. Back to the hospital corridor.
Later. And later.
Hospital corridor.
And this is the issue that, as we said, this is why we wanted to count people, because they're often not counting themselves. They're not counting the labour of love they do as labour, they're seeing it as love. But if you can get help in that labour, then you've got more time to love.
That's right. And let's be fair, it's not love for everyone, you know, it is a. Is a messy, tangled, complicated mix of love, of duty, of obligation, of responsibility. Family dynamics are extremely difficult. Not always sunshine and roses and, you know, rainbow ponies, but you're in it. You're in it. So, you know, these numbers are going to be so, so helpful to really start to shine a light on that. Let's talk about the next 10 years.
Yeah.
So we said that obviously the population is aging at a very rapid rate. We will see the Sandwich Generation grow from 2.43 million to over 6 million people within a decade. Now, when you kind of map that out, that is 760 people every single day who are joining us, becoming part of this 760 a day in Australia every single day. Can you think of another club that has got that rate of membership? Sarah, can you think about, like, what else is happening in our society that is growing at that rate?
Wow. That's because that's with the aging population. Yeah. And as the baby boomers, that big group in the population that are booming as they start to get older and need help, that's how many are gonna be joining us every day.
Every single day. So, listeners, it's a crowded club. You're gonna have a lot of people around you who are going to be really leaning in to the things that you're already managing in your life. Tap them, tell them where we are, point them towards these conversations and the help and resources that they can get ready. But that is a huge rate of growth.
There's not going to be much room on the dance floor, is there?
Well, we're going to be, we're going to be under our doonas.
That's a very crowded club.
It is a really.
And that's why the system needs to start seeing us and the work we do and how we are flailing within the system because that is going to get bigger as well.
We need to look out for each other. We need to look out for the people around us who are, we know are in this already or stepping into it as part of that 760 every single day. And you and I are going to take this out to the media and really start to stimulate some conversations around Australia's sandwich generation that now has a number.
And now when people will be doing stories about the sandwich generation, they'll be able to look up the actual number.
Loud and proud, Sarah.
Not the guesstimate.
No more guesstimates.
You will count now, you will be seen now, you will be acknowledged now by the system. And I do think that's huge because part of the emotion, the guilt, the resentment that can go along with being in the sandwich generation and that crushing responsibility is the fact that we're not seen and we're not counted. That's right, yeah.
You're just meant to cope.
Absolutely meant to cope.
Can I add one more thing? Now, listeners will know that we've talked quite a bit about this Faces campaign and this is where we started to get some really strong signals that people were really worried about some of these issues. So we kicked this campaign off in July and we were saying, hey, people are waiting, you know, 8, 9, 10 months for their home care packages to be released. Nearly 5,000 people last year died waiting. That's 13 people a day. I just want to share that the government this week just released some new figures because Senator Anne Ruston asked twice what the new number was for the year that just ended the financial year at the end of June. It's now over 6,000 per year. That is 17 people a day. That is now five times the national road toll, up from three times the national Road toll. And again, no progress from the government in terms of one honest count of the number of people waiting for their packages in the queue and dying while they were waiting. So these issues, you know, they're not so disparate. They're all pretty connected because for every family in that 10 month queue, there is a very strung out daughter or son filling all of those gaps.
And this is the problem with the queues being long, but it's also something we can do about it and that's where we come back to the plan. If you register your parent earlier in the system, get on the waiting list even when you think they're doing well, just if a few little things starting to change, get them on the waiting list early because by the time they actually may get assessed, their needs may be much greater. And that way we can hopefully. Because that's so many people in so much pain trying to juggle and manage things and not being able to get their parent care until right to the end of their lives.
That's right.
And it compounds the grief.
You don't want to be applying for my aged care from a hospital bed.
No, you really do.
Let me tell you, you do not want to be doing that. So yeah, that is our, that is our mantra, isn't it? Start early, start gently. And we want to help you with that. It's why Vera decided to really lean in and commission this research. Because we are building the tools and the resources to help the sandwich generation as they care for their aging parents. So have a look at Vera guide because there's a lot there that can help you. But you know, listeners, you are now part of a population that has been spending years in this kind of invisible cloud that has been nameless and numberless. You're not anymore. So please share this report with people that you think need to see it. We've made it really easy. When you go on and have a look at the report, there's a very simple little share button that allows you to flick this out to all the people in your world that think they might need to look at these numbers too.
Especially those people who are new to the sandwich. One of the 750 a day joining.
Or your boss. Your boss or your brother. Yeah.
Who doesn't help you or your sister who's not there. Let them know that you are doing this work and that you are one of a silent army. And make sure that every time you hear about a friend or a family member starting to join in that you let them know about this. You could even send this report to your parents.
You could perhaps you absolutely could.
And you could say, this is why I need you to help me to help you.
Yeah, yeah.
Big cue.
That could be quite a strategic move for some families.
Yeah, that's a big cue. And the queue's getting bigger as the ageing goes on. So let's just, let's get help in helping you. And you probably won't need it. It'll probably be fine. But it might be a really good thing to do and let's keep using
the language of the sandwich generation. It is really starting to stick out there. So now we've got the term and the number that sits behind it.
Let's.
Let's own this clubbers. This is ours to own.
Excellent. Well, thank you to all the clubbers who come up to me and chat to me about all these things.
You have a lot of blokes tapping you on this shoulder. Talk about the podcast. Yeah.
The guy at the airport. It's really interesting.
What are they saying to you?
They're just saying, oh, thank you. It was really helpful because I had no idea what I was getting in for. And this guy said to me last night, I ran into. He said, you know, I'd be listening. And I go, yep, that's me. Yep, that's me. Yep, that's me. So I think often the. It's interesting for men because I don't think they often carry the invisible work that women do and are often used to doing. So I think the blokes in the sandwich should be helping us, the women who just accept this as their lot to kind of make that point. But of course, there's a lot of blokes doing it too. And it's interesting. You can get information, you can get planning. You need to understand that you are a carer. There is a system that can help you. And maybe we need to do an episode of like, okay, here's the five things that can help you right from the beginning. And the carers gateway is a good resource.
Vera is a great resource for those that know about it. Yeah, Vera. Vera is always free for families and there's just so much now that is part of that platform to help people. There are great services out there. It's just that not enough people know about them. But we have your back, clubbers.
And don't sell yourself. Sure. Because a lot of people will message us and they'll go, I don't know if this counts, but today I had to take mum to three different appointments.
Of course it counts.
It counts.
Yeah, of course.
I don't know if this counts, but I'm just in hospital here with my dad and really struggling. I don't know if this counts, but I just had a fight with the chemist who wouldn't give me my mum's prescription. It does count.
I don't think this counts. But my dad can't drive anymore, so I have to drive him everywhere because he won't take a taxi and he
doesn't, you know, I don't know if this counts. But I'm driving 200 kilometres a week because my dad won't get the order of the food.
Actually, I've just been speaking to a family about that exact situation. So let's, let's help each other, guys,
because you do count.
You do count.
It counts.
And we will do doona day.
And now you count turds. We see you love it.
Tell us what you think you know, share. Share the questions that you might have, the things that come up for you as you read the research, anything that you're more curious about. There's a heap of detail behind it, but we've tried to kind of put it forward in a way that is not going to break your brain.
As you've read it, you don't have time to add any more complications to your life. It's pretty simple and easy to read.
Yeah.
You can email us@helloubsandwich.com you can also message us on our Facebook or Instagram for Club Sandwich. And thank you for your work. You are amazing. You are doing a great job. And now that job is being counted. Welcome to the club. If you've just joined, there's lots of episodes you can go back and listen to. Pick the ones that really are where you are right now. You can suggest episodes that we do as well. That can be helpful.
And we've got some great episodes coming up, including a sneaky little side trip to LA where Sarah and I are going to meet and interview some pretty amazing people doing some pretty amazing things. So stay tuned for that.
That'll be funny. Do we have to walk through LA like this? Are we going to be the only people that actually look our age? No, L.A. city of Angels.
Yep.
Where there's some good work going on in this space.
There's some great work and there'll be some great conversations. Can't wait to bring them to you.
Yeah. All right, clubbers, thank you. You matter, you count. And remember, you're doing a great job, as I said, and you have got them, we have got you. And now you count.
Maybe you've got a parent who is coming out of hospital and you're wondering what would help them feel more settled. A hand with the meals, maybe some help getting ready in the morning. And how can you coordinate and pay for that support quickly? Supported home funding might be approved, but the funding is months away. Vera can help you coordinate the care in that gap. Understand the funding options, including how things like home equity could help. We explain the costs and the trade offs to you in plain English. We can then help you plan the care with your parent and find a trusted provider in your area. It's free, safe and secure for families always. So have a look at Vera guide so you can take the next step with a clearer picture.