More 'ethnic-specific' nursing homes will be needed to care for the growing proportion of elderly Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds, the Federal Government says.
One-in-four Australians over the age of 80 is projected to be from a non-English speaking background by 2026, the Minister for Ageing, Mark Butler, told World News Australia Radio.
He said elderly people from non-English speaking backgrounds who needed residential care mostly lived in mainstream nursing homes.
However, issues of language, culture and food meant many faced difficulties. Also of concern was the effect of dementia on English skills.
“One of the particular impacts of dementia is that people experiencing dementia will often lose their second language,” he said.
“So if they've come from a non-English speaking background, learnt English, if they're affected by dementia the patient will often lose their English and revert to their original language.”
The broad challenge of Australia's ageing population was the subject of a major report delivered by the Productivity Commission in August.
Prior to its release, the federal government announced a telephone interpretation service for residents of aged care facilities whose first language is not English.
KNOWLEDGE LACKING
However, Angela Ng from the Chinese Community Social Services Centre in Melbourne says the service cannot match the benefit of multilingual aged-care staff.
“For example in our case, we have Chinese-speaking social workers who actually have the knowledge in aged care,” he said.
“However, interpreters, they may not have the knowledge, they just interpret or translate things directly from the information pamphlet.
“And because there are many jargons and it's so complex, that people don't understand the terms, terminology, and they cannot understand what are the benefits of different services.
“But if we can have a Chinese-specific staff, we can actually explain to them what is this and what is that.”
Food was another important factor, Ms Ng said, with nursing homes not always providing culturally appropriate menu options.
“For example, for Chinese we usually have rice at home,” she said.
“Unfortunately, in most of the mainstream residential services they may not be able to provide the genuine Chinese food and you can imagine, every day when you live in a place without your own food, how miserable that you will be.”
Mr Butler said the Federal Government was consulting with ethnic communities while considering its formal response to the Productivity Commission report.
This included recognising the need for ethnic communities to provide their own aged care services.
“We need to increase the ability of particular ethnic communities - whether it's the Greek community, or the Vietnamese community, or others - to build their own ethnic-specific services,” he said.
“For example, at a Vietnamese nursing home, Vietnamese workers who have good Vietnamese skills working there all the time. So this is the challenge for us I think.”
