Policy|Elderly care
“This requires a complete correction movement from the government,” says Orpo.
The coalition chairman Petteri Orpo says that the combination of nurse oversizing and the shortage of nurses has driven elderly services into probably the worst crisis of modern times.
“The state of services for the elderly, combined with the shortage of caregivers, is such a comprehensive issue that it requires a particularly extensive program package. Nurse assessment, at least in its current form, does not work. Something must be done about it,” says Orpo.
According to Orpo, care for the elderly is now in a situation that the coalition warned about before the last election.
“We have services for the elderly in a worse crisis than they have probably ever been in modern history. This requires a complete corrective movement from the government. It cannot be that the government blames each other and throws up its hands. We have to find solutions for this”, says Orpo.
“The formulaic nurse sizing of one form of treatment does not solve the problem, but makes it worse. There are not enough nurses. Three thousand places for private care have been disabled. Elderly people under home services receive worse care and are in worse shape. They apply to the emergency room and fill the emergency rooms.”
Read more: The shortage of nurses is already closing nursing homes for the elderly in the capital region
Family– and the Minister of Basic Services Aki Lindén (sd) already flashed flexes for nurse sizing In an interview with Ilta-Sanomi on Tuesday.
Lindén asked if the support staff could be assigned tasks that would be included in the sizing.
“Things have to be looked at from all sides, whether the law can be kept in force, but to some extent interpretations make it easier,” Lindén told IS.
Orphan says that he “here and now” is not going to demand the scrapping of the nurse assessment.
“In the near future, we will present our own alternative on how to fix this.”
Orpo’s prudence may be due to the fact that he could even be prime minister now without the discussion on the size of nurses during the previous parliamentary elections. During the last election, serious problems in care for the elderly were revealed. In particular, private healthcare companies were accused of caring for the elderly with too few staff.
Many parties started to push for a solution to nurse rationing.
Before the elections, Orpo was the only chairman of a major party, who openly objected presented nurse sizing.
“A person is not a decimal,” Orpo said. In retrospect, it has been speculated that, to a significant extent, because of that sentence, the coalition may have lost the seat of the prime minister’s party.
Later, the coalition also turned in support of the nurse rationing.
Nurse dimensioning entered into force at the end of 2020, but there was a transition period of several years, so that municipalities and other service providers can prepare for the increase in staffing needs and costs.
From the beginning of next April, it is planned to have at least 0.7 employees for each elderly person in enhanced service housing and institutional care.
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