Australia isn't ready to grow old, experts warn

The sixth Intergenerational Report, released on Thursday, revealed the number of Australians aged 65 and over will more than double in the next four decades.

The population older than 80 will more than triple and centenarians are expected to increase six-fold.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says it is an opportunity to "turn grey into gold" and boost jobs across the care sector.

But to meet demand the care workforce will need to double and Darshini Ayton, deputy head of Monash University's Health and Social Care Unit, says Australia isn't ready.

"We just don't have the resources as a country and so we are at a tipping point," she told AAP.

In the two years since the aged care royal commission handed down its findings, the government has implemented some recommendations: increasing pay for carers, mandating 200 care minutes per resident per day and requiring compulsory staffing levels.

While Dr Ayton says these are excellent changes, she believes they and other suggestions from the Intergenerational Report are "bandaid fixes".

"They haven't actually been looking at whether we have the workforce to do these things, so we're setting that system up to fail," she said.

With many workers spending long hours tending to people with increasingly complex needs, the care sector is struggling to retain and recruit.

In May, multiple aged care facilities run by Wesley Mission closed because of workforce shortages, forcing hundreds of elderly residents to relocate.

Chief executive Stu Cameron at the time blamed workforce pressures imposed by the government's 24/7 staffing requirements.

Amid all this, the sector has been told to add an extra two million to its workforce by 2063.

While the Intergenerational Report offered migrant workers as a potential solution, Dr Ayton says that alone is not enough.

"If we position aged care and other sectors as these jobs that Australians don't want to do, that's never going to be a successful workforce."

Employers will need to teach migrant workers to communicate with Australians and understand local culture, alongside all the usual training required when entering the industry.

With life expectancy set to hit 87 years for men and 89 years for women by 2063, the kind of work carers are asked to provide is undergoing a fundamental shift.

When the residential aged care system began to bloom in the mid-20th century, it was a form of social care set up for older people who felt lonely and may have required some assistance.

Nowadays, many in aged care are living with complex health conditions.

"They're frail, they have physical restrictions, they have have cognitive restrictions. It takes an extraordinarily talented and well-equipped workforce to do meaningful care," Dr Ayton said.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates more than half of all residents living in permanent facilities have dementia.

The sector more broadly is also struggling financially despite funding injections from the federal government.

Aneta Waretini, a caregiver who works with in-home care provider Home Instead, loves her clients and her job, but she says the lack of funding holds her and her colleagues back.

"We're physically willing and want to do what we can for our clients but we don't have enough resources or time or funding to go in and support our clients that bit more," she told AAP.

"And that's the most frustrating thing."

Clients sometimes cannot afford proper equipment like hospital-style beds in their homes and services don't always have enough money to provide one directly.

"Getting a walker, for example, sometimes has to go through a process and then there's a fee and by then a client may have already had a fall," she said.

"So it has made them deteriorate a lot more and now they're in hospital and soon the whole thing starts again.

"We need to step it up and our services need to be available a lot sooner rather than later."

Within aged care facilities, Dr Ayton says policy changes have shifted the way money is allocated to each resident which means many homes can no longer cover the cost of care for its clients.

Seven in every 10 providers were operating at a loss and were losing an average of $28 per resident per day, according to the Aged and Community Care Providers Association.

Rather than address these problems in patchwork, Dr Ayton believes the industry needs to be entirely reinvented.

"Now is the time to disrupt it," she said.

"We need to think about do we just start again, because we're trying to pick and tinker with things that have been in place for 200 years or so and it's not working."

Australian Associated Press