By Suzanne Greenwood
Chief Executive Officer
Catholic Health Australia
Catholic health and aged care services in Australia have carved out an especially rich and respected tradition, spanning more than 170 years and built upon the principles of caring for all and the inherent dignity of the human person, service, the common good, and preference for the poor, marginalised and under-served.
Together with the Good Samaritan parable, which is widely recognised as the original founding story of healthcare systems in the Western world, these principles formed the foundations of some of Australia’s most trusted health and aged care services.
Catholic Health Australia (CHA) represents the largest single grouping of non-government health, aged and community care services in the country. CHA’s members include St John of God Health Care, MercyCare, St Vincent’s Health Australia, Mercy Health, Catholic Homes and Southern Cross Care, among a number of others.
Authentically a leadership group, CHA was born in 1978 after the first National Catholic Health Care Conference of the leaders and owners of Catholic health and aged care providers from across Australia. CHA works to promote justice and compassion in healthcare, inform public policy, advocate for reform and strengthen the presence and influence of Catholic health and aged care services, which contribute significantly to Australia’s overall health and aged care service capacity.
Catholic providers operate more than 9,500 hospital beds across 77 hospitals – both public and private – Australia-wide. Catholic providers account for over 25 per cent of the country’s private hospital capacity and about 10 per cent of all health care services in the country. CHA also has member Catholic hospitals in Singapore and Malaysia. In terms of aged care provision, Catholic service providers in Australia operate 23,000 residential aged care beds and provide high-quality care services to over 20,000 home care and support clients.
Catholic care providers are serious about quality of care and serious about improved care for all. Importantly, Catholic providers acknowledge the spiritual significance of health, illness, suffering and death. This leads us to understand health and aged care as being more than a scientific pursuit; it is an endeavour to care for the whole person, often beyond the limits of science.
Exciting advancements in health care, paired with an increased onus on the importance of health education and preventative health, has seen Australia’s life expectancy rise significantly in the past decades. This is a marvellous success of medicine, but a new and very different reality that Australia must prepare for—both economically, and in terms of meeting the care requirements of an ageing population with adequate high-quality care services, tailored to the needs of the individual.
With an increasingly older population subject to higher rates of chronic disease, dementia and other conditions requiring complex care, the place of the Catholic health and aged care sector and its mission to protect the most vulnerable people in our society is perhaps even more important now than it has ever been.
For example, 40 per cent of hospitalisations in 2013–14 were for people aged 65 and over, who accounted then for 13 per cent of Australia’s population; some 270,560 people aged 65 and over were in residential aged care at some point within the same period, and approximately 83,500 people received home care.
Death and dying, including the quality of person-centred care delivered towards the end of life, are issues at the forefront of Catholic advocacy efforts in health and aged care.
Catholic health care providers are calling for greater support to ensure every Australian has equitable access to quality palliative care services, rather than introducing reforms that would allow for an already vulnerable person to elect to have their life ended by clinician-assisted suicide. Palliative care discussion should be promoted across the community, encouraging people to discuss their wishes for healthcare openly, in parallel with increasing the development and implementation of advance care planning.
CHA continues to work with and support its member organisations, advocating to government and funders to develop effective policy in all areas impacting our health and aged care.
It is a privilege to champion Australian Catholic health and aged care services. The sisters, nuns, priests and brothers of the first Catholic health care institutions to establish themselves in Australia lived and breathed the healing ministry of Jesus. They delivered much-needed services to some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the community – people who would otherwise not have had access to care. The Catholic ethos such institutions embodied still circulates and resonates just as strongly today.
It is an exciting time to represent the interests of quality whole-person care, for every Australian, no matter their beliefs, background or circumstance.
From pages 19 and 20 from Issue 4: ‘Health’ of The Record Magazine