Increasing Spending on Aged Care Services

Running head: AGED CARE
Aged care
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1AGED CARE
Debate position: It is justifiable to increase spending on aged care services.
Affirmative speaker points:
Increasing spending on aged care service is important because of the problem of low
staffing level and its impact on job turnover, job dissatisfaction and intention to leave the job.
Many health care staffs have the opinion that they are not adequately paid. According to the
Parliament of Australia (2013), nursing workforce shortage is increasing in aged care service and
it is projected that there will be a shortage of 100, 000 by 2025. Wang et al. (2015) gives the
evidence that nurses working in the elderly care have low job satisfaction compared to those in
other work environments. In such situation, increasing staffing level is necessary to improve staff
retention rates, promote better continuity of care and ensure that the care delivered maintains the
innate dignity of patients as all human beings have innate purpose and dignity. Furthermore, it
will reduce overall burden of care and improve satisfaction level of staffs because of better or
favourable practice environment (Pineau Stam et al., 2015). Hence, investment in staffing ratio is
an ethically sound decision as it will ensure that greater emphasis is paid to maintaining
appropriate patient staff ratio and identifying additional training needs for staffs.
In addition, Aged care service mostly use outdated and poorly maintained equipment
resulting in poor assessment of patient and risk of adverse events for elderly patients (Kim et al.,
2017). Certain assessments tools are important to identify risk of adverse events in patients such
as falls, injury and medication error. For example, if validated tool is used assess fall risk, it will
help in implementation of appropriate fall prevention strategies. However, if appropriate
equipments are not used for assessment, then risk of fall (such as gait or balanced related