RNZ<\/a><\/p>\nThe Aged Care Association, the union for aged care providers, said unions taking Health NZ to court over travel costs should be a wake-up call for policymakers.<\/p>\n
The association said that for years, the government had promoted care in the home as the more compassionate and cost-effective option for older people.<\/p>\n
But it argued home-based care was only cheaper because key costs like travel were being put onto support workers.<\/p>\n
“This is not efficiency. It is cost displacement.”<\/p>\n
It said time spent driving between clients, workforce turnover, missed early interventions and avoidable hospital admissions all carried real costs which were not being counted in the comparison.<\/p>\n
The fuel price spike had not created a problem, the association said \u2013 it had revealed one.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, ministers told RNZ they had sought urgent advice about how best to ease the pain of rising fuel prices for in-home care workers and other public servants who might be in a similar plight.<\/p>\n
Support workers are not fully reimbursed for their transport costs despite having to visit injured, disabled or elderly people as part of their job.<\/p>\n
Health Minister Simeon Brown said the Government was acutely aware of how fuel prices were hurting carers \u2013 and he hoped to resolve that very soon.<\/p>\n
Finance Minister Nicola Willis said they were waiting on advice about how to deliver temporary, targeted and timely help to care workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aged care advocates say the fuel crisis has exposed a longstanding problem, with home-based care only cheaper on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":357239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1667,42,134,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-357238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-energy","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/357239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}