Table 1
Number of participants for each group and LGA.
| LGA | COMMUNITY FORUMS:AGED CARE WORKERS | COMMUNITY FORUMS:OLDER PEOPLE | INTERVIEWS:GPS | TOTALS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Canterbury-Bankstown | 8 | 8 | 2 | N = 18 |
| Camden | 7 | 39 | 4 | N = 50 |
| Campbelltown | 5 | 1 | 1 | N = 7 |
| Fairfield | 10 | 6 | 1 | N = 17 |
| Liverpool | 10 | 6 | 0 | N = 16 |
| Wingecarribee | 12 | 15 | 4 | N = 31 |
| Wollondilly | 8 | 11 | 2 | N = 21 |
| Totals | N = 60 | N = 86 | N = 14 | N = 160 |
Table 2
Theme 1: Access to community aged care services.
| SUB-THEMES | QUOTES |
|---|---|
| Barriers to service utilisation | “It’s about being mobile, it’s about having access, it’s about who’s going to help you, who’s going to support you, who’s going to be an advocate for you. If you’re on your own and you are in your own home and you for some reason could not afford or weren’t aware that there were support services available for you, who’s going to help you?” – Wingecarribee Community Forum Older People. |
| Ideas to facilitate service access and utilisation | “Certain cultures will not necessarily go to a healthcare worker or a service for information because they may not be familiar with that service or they’re just not used to their country of origin having that service, so they would possibly go to … not a church leader, but someone that’s quite well-known in the community as like an elder.” – Fairfield Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
| MyAgedCare government portal | “I just want to stress that CALD communities, they tend to have more difficulties, and the [MyAgedCare] call centre is a difficult place to go through if you’re from the CALD background, and as an assessor myself I’ve been reduced to tears trying to get through MyAgedCare the call centre. And then I’ve had beautiful experiences also where the person is like thank God you were on the phone today, thank you, can I call you at home, where are you in Australia, please I just want to talk to you. And then other times it’s like why?” – Camden Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
[i] Note: CALD = Culturally and linguistically diverse.
Table 3
Theme 2: Healthcare service and medical needs.
| SUB-THEMES | QUOTES |
|---|---|
| Healthcare and medical issues for older people | “The staff aren’t really trained in aged care or dementia … there are inadequate registered nurses on duty.” – Camden Community Forum Older People. |
| Healthcare and medical issues for caregivers | “I think carers will regularly put their own health needs to the side to care for those that they’re looking after, especially if that person is at risk of going into residential care and they really don’t want that.” – Canterbury-Bankstown Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
| Services needed | “I think it [improved access to allied health] would make a huge difference because it would reduce the … huge burden on general practice … and … reduce hospital admissions and … out of hours … as well.” – Camden GP. |
Table 4
Theme 3: Social concerns and needs.
| SUB-THEMES | QUOTES |
|---|---|
| Social concerns for older people | “And you’ve got a high incidence of older people with depression, so this contributes to their social isolation as well. I think it’s just a vicious cycle for them.” – Liverpool Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
| “Social isolation, it makes older people more vulnerable … because if they’re spending a lot of their time at home and they don’t see anybody, it’s very easy for them to be approached by anyone and be financially abused because they’re lonely and they’re looking for friendship, and someone is suddenly being kind to them and paying them attention, so it opens them up to predators for I think financial abuse and other types of abuse as well.” – Fairfield Community Forum Aged Care Workers. | |
| Social concerns for caregivers | “Well, there’s probably a lot of carer stress involved that they couldn’t get any respite … I’ve seen a lot of them become depressed and anxious about the situation, and in the end, they had to put them in the nursing home.” – Fairfield GP |
| Ideas to address social needs | “It’s time for older people to give something back …. Maybe just helping kids with homework, it can be heaps of things. So, older people should be encouraged to volunteer because it’s in giving that we actually receive.” – Canterbury-Bankstown Community Forum Older People. |
Table 5
Theme 4: Education and information needs.
| SUB-THEMES | QUOTES |
|---|---|
| Barriers to education and information access | “Because you’re not computer minded, because you can’t transmit by message, because you can’t do technology … and I come from a migrant family that they never went to school and therefore I’m lucky enough that I can understand English … I haven’t got any of my family that can help me. I’m on my own, I need support.” – Liverpool Community Forum Older People. |
| Ideas to facilitate education and information access | “I think you also have to address their social and cultural contexts, because I have a lot of patients who I give them the information and I keep giving the information and we do it in all sorts of ways, but because they have these cultural beliefs that they can’t have people in their houses or you know, you can’t send your mum to a nursing home, there’s that breakdown.” – Wollondilly Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
| Advance care planning education | “I think this advance care planning and the planning to die … needs to be talked about in the general community … advertisements, programs on TV [are] a great way to get the word out there to the mass public and start to talk about it, and the more you talk about it the less foreign it seems. I think that’s the only way, changing the way society thinks in general.” – Liverpool Community Forum Aged Care Workers. |
| GP education | “Because GPs are very time poor, because we deal with a broad spread of geriatric problems, training needs to be condensed. It needs to be clinically relevant, it needs to be basically concise and delivered in a way that the GP can then refer to sometime in the future, so it’s not the way the information is being delivered, [but] rather what sort of information we need.” – Wingecarribee GP. |