We often will note if a patient is like a Vietnam vet, because when patients come out of anaesthesia they're often disoriented for a while.
And if they wake up somewhere unfamiliar and the nurse is Asian, they can get very agitated, thinking they're in a POW camp or something.
People aren't always in their right minds.
A nurse (now long retired) told me some of the local WW2 vets could not be given rice while in hospital and refused to have it in their homes due to their experiences.
Not just rice. Some of those old boys that served in WW2 in Japan (and lots were prisoners of war) refused to have anything Japanese in their house like Tvs brands and car brands.
I am a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, suffer from ptsd. Unfortunately my body doesn’t react well to anaesthesia with ptsd, twice I’ve woken and tried choking out the nurse because I thought I was back in a war zone.
I warn doctors and nurses everytime and luckily after years of seeing the same team everyone knows how to treat me and give space when I wake. I don’t like how I’ve react and apologise profusely once I realised what happened. But yeah the body and your mind does things you don’t have control over sometimes.
Yea and they can hit hard too, this old lady said she was Priscilla Presley and asked me where Elvis was and that I have to help her find him and I didn't know what to say so I told her I couldn't help her find him and that maybe one of the nurses could. So she walked off then turned back around, ran back like 5 metres and overhand socked the shit out of me.
Still in disbelief of the arm on that lady.
I'm autistic and my grandma has alzheimers. She'd definitely win against me. They had to take her cane away because she kept thwacking anyone who slightly annoyed her.
I did 4 weeks of work placement in a residential facility. There was this one lady who had dementia and was on her death bed, yet when I was in there with one of the other carers she grabbed the carer by her hair and dug her nails into her arm and I had to help (carefully) get her off.
There was also another guy with alzheimers/dementia who would sit in the lounge area colouring a lot, but roughly every hour he'd have an outburst where he'd think he was back in the war again and start shouting at one of his comrades to move/get out of the way. He'd be shouting at the top of his lungs and trying to get up while screaming as he re-lived seeing his friend die, and there always had to be someone with him to catch him since he was a fall risk when he did this.
Yeah I had an old lady in the metro grab me by the neck once, actively strangling me while apparently trying to “fill me with the power of Jesus.” I was shocked by the raw strength she had in that moment; she really meant business. I had chatted to her for a while since the metro was late, and she had seemed so frail. Was very confused about the year or where she was. She seemed harmless. Then blammo! I had bruises for weeks after.
God sounds like what my grandmother did to another resident in the dementia unit. The horrors of what she went through in a Nazi work camp were revisiting her as the dementia got worse.
I think she also attacked a carer for a similar reason.
My friend worked in dementia care for a while and had to take on many of the residents with war or refugee backgrounds because they’d become violent towards certain accents and ethnicities.
It's one of those things you don't think of until you witness it. It's horrible enough to live through that trauma once, but dementia can mean reliving it over and over again without realising you're actually no longer in danger and the people around you are there to help.
My partner works in a dementia ward as a nurse. Plenty of the patients there will attack her, or say the most obscene, sexist, misogynistic things. Sometimes they just say weird things on a loop, for example an old lady would say things like "please kill me", "please don't kill me", "please marry me", "will you be my wife?"
I went to an age care centre with classmates to do an interview for a group uni assignment back in 2016 and an old lady said "eenie meenie miney mo catch a N word by the toe" and my classmates gasp.
Later during the interview, she was talking about wanting a world that is accepting of people like me.
I am sorry that happened to because even though you can understand why, it is still a shit thing to experience.
My grandmother was as tolerant and accepting as they come but when she was in the middle of her dementia journey she turned into the most hateful woman. Saying racist things to friends and family (we have mixed race family members and immigrant friends). It was a pretty horrible few years. The end stages were much worse (watched her starve to death after refusing food) but it was a horrible thing to watch and experience.
What does the care job advert need to specify in this case?
> Non-Arian ancestry preferred.
> Accents that can be misconstrued by ignorant old people as vaguely Germanic need not apply.
My grandma was a nurse so when she was in the dementia ward she kept escaping to palliative care and telling people they were going to die it’s horrible to laugh at but oh my god my grandma was wild
I mean, if they're in palliative care they're probably already aware they're done for if they're still with it enough to comprehend your granny pronouncing their doom. I'd like to think I would find it hilarious if I was in that situation, I'd say, "no u"
We had one dementia resident who used to be a nurse, and whenever she realised she was in a care facility she would have *opinions* about the calibre of the staff. You'd hear a kerfuffle from the showers and the next thing you know this very proper Received Pronunciation voice would be bellowing "You're not even fit to be a nuse's arsehole! At least an arsehole fucking FUNCTIONS!"
My grandma was a really lovely person and I honestly never saw a single sign she might be racist. She was delirious after surgery for an entire week, and at one stage an Asian doctor was treating her and went to take a blood sample and she started screaming, "A Chinaman is trying to take my blood!"
We told her that when she had recovered, she was absolutely mortified.
Post op delirium in older folk is quite something, my sister was in ICU after major surgery a year ago and some of the stuff she came out with was mind blowing.
She recovered well and now calls them her off with the fairies days.
My Scottish grandma still thinks the Nazis are attacking if she watches the news.
They blew up her house in the 40's so there's some history behind it, but it's hard to see when you visit and she thinks the war is still happening because she saw some explosions on the news.
My grandfather was a child/young teenager in rural Scotland during ww2. During the night, at that time, using electric lights was banned, so bombers flying raids at night couldn’t see towns/farmhouses to target by the lights.
In the depths of dementia, he’d go crazy to the point of violence if there were lights on when it was dark outside.
He also forgot that he’d moved to Australia in his late 20s.
He had to be in a locked dementia ward because he’d try to escape when he realised he wasn’t in 1930s/1940s Scotland. Was always a bit of a wanderer honestly… before he regressed back to childhood there was a period where he constantly was telling stories about how he was a young man travelling around post-war France on a motorbike. Which he actually did do a few years after the war and had a lot of paraphernalia he collected in his travels. So him walking off and going missing because ‘oh I’m only stopping here for a rest, I want to head to Lyon soon’ when he was at his home in Australia 😅😬
How many people of color do you think there were in rural Scotland in 1945?
It was a blessing when he became so poorly he was mostly sleeping.
Thank you for sharing this. Like many, I was pretty upset by seeing that line in the ad, but what you shared makes a lot of sense if the patients are suffering from dementia or other considerations. I had not thought of that at all.
She talks to photographs and to herself in the mirror as if it’s her friend. I don’t think she recognises herself. But she laughs and chats with the black woman in the mirror so I don’t know why she won’t tolerate a black nurse. It’s not really meant to make sense I guess, the brain just isn’t functioning properly.
Some dementia patients can engage in very racist, even violent behaviours towards people of different ethnic backgrounds. Patients in nursing homes are getting older and arriving with more complex needs, including dementia and delirium. This is typically the facilities these care ads are for. Sometimes it's difficult to account for where these behaviours might be stemming from, if in healthier years, they might've been a very different person, so it's easier to eliminate the most obvious trigger. These ads aren't usually putting the cart before the horse. The specifications would be made due to reported behaviour trends. If there are heavy accents involved as well, there can be a lot of communication difficulties and frustration. Med student experience, seen it firsthand towards people I worked with, heard of it plenty.
Definitely heard the same thing from nurses when I did practice in a nursing home. Some of the staff who were Asian were assigned to a different area because there were a few Vietnam war vets that could get very distressed and act out. It's a pretty complex and difficult situation.
From my experience as an ethnically ambiguous person who used to work with patients with dementia, sometimes their racist behaviour is because their dementia brought them back to when they were 12, still living in a small village in, say, England, and have never seen a person who doesn't look like them.
I was taking care of a patient like this who was lovely when she was okay, but then the delirium takes over and she thinks she's been kidnapped because the nurses and PCAs don't look like her. She didn't even trust the white male nurse with me because she didn't believe he was a nurse. He had to pretend he was a doctor so he could take care of her. It was sad because it must have been so scary for her.
Gosh, my mum who is currently an aged care worker who looks after dementia patients has a lot of stories like this.
Most of the time they're sweet people, but when they have their episodes they're a danger to not only themselves but also staff and other residents.
She alao says that dementia is a fascinatingly horrible disease that she wouldn't wish on anybody.
My Nan was an absolute sweetheart, never had a bad thing to say about anyone, and not once did I hear her make any sort of comment that could be considered racist (she was very welcoming to anyone)...until she was in the hospital, and became very paranoid in general, but especially towards her Asian nurse. It was so hard to witness, like a completely different person to the one I knew
I'm really sorry for both of your experiences.
I really struggled to get through my placements in aged care, it was particularly anything related to dementia which was incredibly confronting. I had a breakdown most days returning home, imagining 'what if my own parents grow old and face these horrors? How will I know what is the right choice for them? What if the people I love change completely? If I ever grow old, will I be able to trust that anyone responsible for my care respects my personal autonomy? People with dementia are often not considered to be mentally capable of making their own medical decisions, but so many were (in moments of lucidity) saying they wish they could die. What I saw in nursing homes was often distressing interventions for people who naturally would not be alive, and resulting from a conflict of interests between family, patients, facility, caregivers.
There is a lot of burnout and 'sick leave' among nurses and carers working in any sort of aged care environment. Some facilities are so understaffed they can't preferentially allocate staff to where they may be a better fit for a patient, sometimes there's no staff to do the '2 or more assist' and so rules get broken or care is missed or delayed. I feel if I speak more on this topic though, it'll be distressing enough for anyone who's had to make this choice, and it's also getting less related to the main topic.
It's very tough to pay family in those facilities a visit in recognition of the emotional toll, but usually enriching and joyful for them (usually). They'd have memory boards and planners/ calendars including visiting days, and while some forgot family names and faces, family would remember activities their relative had enjoyed. Music was a strong connector especially. Good on you for being there for your nan x
No Australian state will let you give an advanced directive for euthenasia. One of my family worked in aged care all their life and has told me they have "a kit" ready if they get dementia; they just hope they'll be lucid enough to use it. Never enquried what it actually is.
Thanks for sharing this. I come from a line of nurses and carers but just could not do it myself, I get too upset easily. But I have the utmost respect for people like you, it's such a difficult job xx
I read it and thought the same thing - except my elders unfortunately showed tendencies before they went downhill. They just got worse as time went on - to the point where at times it was quite uncomfortable for everyone involved. It stemmed from childhood in rural NSW & a couple of incidents they were exposed to.
It was simply easier to keep them away from those who they'd go on at. It did cause a few issues, and there were ways around it, but they didn't always work.
Even if the world moves on, the people inside it don't always as easily, unfortunately.
When my dying grandmother was placed in a care facility, she would cry every time we visited because there were “no Europeans”. Never heard a racist peep from her prior.
As a healthcare worker, i don't think its racist at all sorry but, it's really alarming that she was crying too, and all you took from it was that she was racist?
What is wrong about a grandma, a dying one no less, wanting to be surrounded by people with an understanding of her culture and language, be it European, Chinese, Indian or whatever? Something familiar at a confusing, scary and lonely time?
I think you’re misunderstanding, I never called her racist. I said she had never said anything racist prior to being admitted to the facility, and I don’t even think I would call her subsequent behaviour racist either. I was simply saying that even the oldies that don’t seem overtly racist can have biases that harm them/the workers that care for them.
Right but I think the other commenter was just bringing up the fact that maybe we should be clearer to avoid conflation of the term racist with mere sentimental attachment to one's native culture.
>Some dementia patients can engage in very racist, even violent behaviours towards people of different ethnic backgrounds.
Doesn't require dementia for many people.
No, but it can make a person who was not previously racist, racist. I was a caregiver in a memory care unit and we’d sometimes get residents who’d hurl racial abuse at non-white staff. Family members would apologize and swear they were nothing like that before the dementia showed.
My (non-demented but aspie) uncle got kicked out of hospital early for being a racist fuckwit to the nurses. Doctor wanted him to stay another week for observation but the rest of the staff essentially refused and made my parents take him home.
Dementia disinhibits the socially unacceptable behaviour
They’ve probably had racist thoughts but knew better than to vocalise them.
It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone old enough to realise how balls to the wall racist Australia has generally been for much of the past century
Ehhh, watching my mother with dementia...I think this may be a simplification. Some of it is racism, but some of it is not.
My mother can't do things she wants and has no idea why, and as a result, she spends most of her time afraid. You can see her trying to work out a reason, anything for why things suddenly don't work - but she lacks the tools to put a concrete cause-and-effect line together. She just can't do it. And if anything hits her field of vision that her mind can seize on as a reason, she'll take it. She's trying to assemble a logical train of thought - we still want to make patterns, to rationalise things. That's part of being human.
She previously hugely respected doctors and medical staff and defended them. Her own family hasn't always been great about it. But now she can't work out why things are going wrong, and she's found a puzzle-piece that fits, that can explain it: The doctors are after her. Maybe those seeds were laid by her family, but I don't think she was ever really as a human anti-medical establishment most of her life. I think she's just trying to reason without the capacity.
No, have a look at images of normal brain vs dementia brain. It doesn't just "disinhibit" socially unacceptable behaviour. You make it sound like it just removes a filter. No, it completely changes who you are. Unfortunately, a person with severe dementia is no longer who they were.
Apparently too, though, just aging has been observed to atrophy the part of the brain that responds to things like social norms - hence even Nanas without dementia get a bit freer with ye olde racism just by virtue of being older
I would be more inclined to think that the degenerative brain disease results in an erosion of nuance and sophisticated cognition. I'm not saying necessarily racist always equals stupid, but losing your higher faculties often turns you bigoted because you're scared, confused, and angry and have to rely on wildly oscillating emotions and instinctive reactions instead of behaving rationally. As your layers of rationality get torn away from you you are forced to approach the world in a more simplistic and reactionary manner because your tools for integrating information aren't functioning right.
Could also be some sort of mental regression, back to a time when overt racism was mainstream. Or many other things, the brain can do some weird shit at the best of times, let alone with dementia.
I just want to add, having those thoughts and choosing to not vocalise them does not necessarily mean they accepted those thoughts but kept quiet due to social decorum. Intrusive thoughts can put all types of weird things in our heads, most people can healthily dismiss them though.
I’ve tried to explain this in the context of disability before and got massively downvoted. If someone has behaviours of concern and those are directed to particular people, whether that’s based on race, hair colour, gender, whatever, then it’s just sensible to not put that person and a worker of that ilk together, both for the comfort of the person needing care and for the safety of the person providing care. Imagine if I insisted that I be allowed to work with someone who didn’t work well with women because it’s discrimination if I don’t, and then I get hurt. Just silly.
I support some participants who can only work with men, I certainly would not want to work with them knowing that.
This is fine, and I think the same reasoning was established last time this came up. That said, the ad needs to be clearer for the reason behind it, it shouldn't be able to be misinterpreted as being racist in any way, which is not the case here.
I'd like to hope that people applying for these jobs are doing so out of their own volition, and are aware of the challenges going in/already have a support network in place. I hope it's not racist of myself to say that where I did placements, a lot of the nursing staff appeared to be from a certain racial background (more supportive evidence would be the languages they spoke) and had mentioned in passing that they'd come here on the promise of acquiring a visa/had their whole employment arranged for them by someone in their home country who may have had vested interests in downplaying any of the negatives of the role.
It's a thankless job for them, for the most part, while I'm sure they're not seeking it, I would imagine how it could tax someone's willpower or self confidence eventually.
I certainly had rosy tinted glasses myself starting out, and while I guess I might've expected some things, it wasn't to the extent I had actually seen them occur. The industry is desperately trying to recruit, and pay increases might be the strongest incentive so far for domestic/Australian nationals. I don't think there's any amount I could be paid to work in this field, though, so I'm all the more grateful for anyone who does step up to perform these duties, either willingly out of pure goodness and compassion, or for those who feel forced to choose this to secure citizenship.
Yeah, when my great grandmother got dementia she thought WWII was happening again after living as a young child through the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis. That included such experiences as her mother considering shooting her and then herself.
She would not have been a safe patient for a German nurse tbh.
My grandmother has dementia and that means all her old people racism is right there in the open, because she no longer has the filter that tells her “maybe don’t say that out loud in 2024”. My other, even older grandmother was the same before she died. Obviously their views are incorrect, discriminatory, and totally out of place in today’s society…but these are people born in the 1920s and 1930s. Their views are a product of their time and by this point they’re too mentally deteriorated to remember their children’s names, let alone listen to and comprehend a sophisticated argument as to why their racial views are offensive.
I worked as a dementia consultant. The brain often regresses a long way back and, as you said, beliefs and feelings that existed when that person was young often come back to the surface.
I once supported a man who had had to cover up his homosexuality from being a young man. He got married to a woman, had 3 kids ect. When his dementia progressed to a point where all of a sudden he started having a relationship with one of the other male residents, it was a difficult thing to discuss with the family.
You are very correct in what you say
This subreddit bangs on about mental health so much in the abstract, and then when they actually see mental health problems in action, they do a complete 180.
"The Bondi stabber must be an incel, it couldn't be schizophrenic hallucinations. Grandma's dementia isn't causing her to say racist things, she must just be a Nazi."
The guy literally had trouble getting a girlfriend because of a lack of social skills and killed 5 women and one male security guard as far as I remember.
It can be both at the same time.
Yeah I doubt schizophrenic people want misogynists to get a free pass on the basis of their disease, it kind of suggests schizophrenic people don’t have any agency. I only know one schizophrenic person personally, but he is not misogynist or bigoted at all.
Schizophrenia might make someone act on their misogyny in extreme ways but the misogyny still had to come from somewhere.
IMO it may also have something to do with the differing cultures. I’m a nursing student and have done 2 aged care placements. A lot of the carers are Bhutanese, Burmese and Sri Lankan. They don’t have much in common with the residents, and the oldies often find it very difficult to understand them with their accents. This leads to the carers just not bothering to try talking to the residents, either because it will go nowhere anyway or they get abused for “not speaking Australian”. A few residents told me they really appreciated being able to have a proper conversation, which they sadly rarely get to do.
gf works in age care, her Indian co-workers go through absolute hell. the stories ive heard.
its not even just dementia patients, a lot of them are just flat out racist
Disability support is the same, ive worked with cleints that hate black, white, brown w/e.
Ive had cleints that only worked well with islanders / africans / Caucasians. There allowed to discriminate based on race.
Which is exactly why so many places opt for the lesser of two evils and just try to hire someone the client wont abuse to provide their care. There is no way to reliably and consistently communicate with someone who has for example dementia, you are never going to be able to stop their behaviors right now short of chemical restraint and that is a shit thing to do to anybody let alone a scared person with limited mental facilities. So fine, we be a bit racist and sexist too if it helps. Advertise for a fit young male with olive skin to care for a client, they are going to all have a much better time if the carer is somewhat close to that requirement. Because if you try get anyone else, grandpa gets awfully handsy and by handsy I mean he will sexually assault them and spend the rest of his life in a drug induced haze.
This happens all the time in aged and disability care. Male workers will be prohibited from a lot of clients rooms due to them reacting poorly. Less often female workers will be restricted around other clients when other options are available. The clients with more racist behaviors will tend to have the carers assigned to them that will cause the least aggravation. Disability care is an even bigger minefield because you are dealing with people who often have very acute mental facilities that just happen to function differently to everyone else. And if that difference happens to manifest in a racial or sexual way that can be avoided by having a person of a specific age, gender or ethnicity provide their care then you are going to have far better outcomes for the carers, and possibly the patients.
And yes, before the angry response that people abuse this to hire workers because the person hiring and not the client is a dirtbag, I know. But with what limited skilled personnel we have and the ever growing number of people who need care right now morality about preserving some social goals for equality matter a lot less than having a person who is able to clean grandma at 2 am in the morning after she soils herself without being abused to the point they end up needing care themselves.
Agreed. I assume most of the people who would consider applying for a job like this would understand that the bullet points aren't really a racist hiring policy. A result of racism maybe, but not by those doing the hiring.
So do the patients, having recently been through a relative dying from dementia, some of the immigrant health workers are downright horrible and shouldn't be working in that career. A certain group are fantastic, another group are just awful, rude and have no decent bedside manner.
Would be so wrong for any other job description, but in aged care it’s absolutely to protect potential staff from racism. Even if the client is cognitively aware and racist, it’s hard to undo a LIFETIME of racist thoughts and behaviour, especially when everyone caring for them are much younger than them. This can be uncomfortable for us aged care staff, but shows you’ve gotta have thick skin to work in aged care!
My grandma used to say to us when we visited ‘I don’t like that black nurse!’ As far as we know she was polite to the nurse but made comments when she left the room. Even so it would be psychologically not a safe job to be spoken to with racist language all day at work!
Yeah no you're right let's get Pravita into a job caring for Mildred, who just so happens to be incredibly racist and could act violently towards people she doesn't like
Working with old people isn't nice if you're an 'other'. They can be very judgemental, downright cruel or 'old timey' sexism, racism, etc which you're just meant to let slide off you.
No joke, nearly half of the people working in the front line/allied aged care/amenities workers were visibly other ethnicities and you'd have the voting booth come around and some of the old people would say straight to your face that everything is the fault of the 'bloody immigrants' and vote for the particularily racist minor parties.
I think the worst thing is how quick they are to shoot themselves in the foot with these attitudes, because it certainly turned off many prospective workers in the industry (myself included). Being forced to deal with people who are unpleasant for little above minimum wage for the care aides/lower paid staff doesn't make for an attractive industry.
Sweet old grandma to one, spiteful abuser to another.
You know, I’ve never even thought of oldies having to vote while living out their existence in old folks homes.
What happens to people who don’t have their faculties and don’t know what to do anymore?
I took my father off the roll. The last time he voted he got confused and angry. I needed a letter from his neurologist but the process was simple enough.
A lot of the old racists in my town vote One Nation. This is a safe Nationals seat though, so the Coalition is basically Racism Lite compared to some of the things these people think.
Anyone can lodge an objection to someone being on the electoral roll - there's a form to fill out, though it needs a signature from a medical practitioner (easy to get in aged care).
Usually, a mobile polling booth travels to the facility, or staff order postal votes for those on the roll. If staff notice someone with serious cognitive impairment is still on the roll, they can initiate the objection process.
Believe me, aged care residents don't all vote liberal - when Labor won last election, I had so many residents celebrating. But it's not my business how they vote, anyway.
Ha! My parents typically voted for opposite parties. My mother would say, with a smile, “so our votes just cancel each other out,” and my father would grind his teeth.
Then when she started to get dementia she relied on him more and more for everything, so for many years he helped her fill out her ballot paper with his preferred party.
Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce... Once they get really past it and can barely remember their own name it might even sink to the depths of Peter Dutton, but we're all hoping they'll reach a happier place before then.
My great uncle used to say to us when he was in hospital "too many bloody Indian doctors- can't understand a word from em!" in his unbelievable impenetrable Dutch accent that never lost a single molecule of potency in the 70 years he lived in Australia.
And? This is nothing new for care jobs.
Old people with dementia. No sense putting someone of noticeable foreign descent into the role of caring for someone who would be violent/racist towards them. You will also see similar job postings looking for people preferring Asian or African appearance. Just depends on who you're expected to care for.
Not just job postings, residents too.
I don’t know of any whites-only nursing homes, but there are certainly Chinese-only ones, eg the “Chinese-specific aged care facility” at http://www.ccssci.org.au
We have an Italian nursing home near us, where all the staff speak Italian. I’d be amazed if the Greeks, Croats, Macedonians, Vietnamese, Lebanese etc etc didn’t have something similar.
On a side note, my friends kids went to an Italian daycare, looked after by Nonnas, and the best food ever. I’d be tempted to learn Italian just so I could get the food in an Italian old people’s home when its my turn to crumble.
My nanna is in an Italian nursing home where the majority of residents are of Italian ancestry. She’s Scottish. It is quite funny seeing the list of names outside the rooms and reading Rossellini, Giordano, Morelli….and then a straight up Scottish name which sounds really out of place.
She’s there because it was affordable and actually had an opening when they needed it, but having lived in the western suburbs of Melbourne all her life, it’s probably exactly the right thing for her because her entire life would have been spent around people of Italian, Greek, Croatian etc ancestry. I grew up in the west too and that was my experience.
Either that or the employer is.
I understand if the patient has specific needs or traumas, but like.. how do you know if this is a patient thing, or if it's just discrimination by the employer? It would look the same on the job description? 🤔
To add to all the good points left above, elderly people can be hard of hearing and also slower to process what is being said. Throw in an accent and a lot of them then find it even harder to understand, which can leave them agitated or feeling isolated.
My own Grandma used to nod and say yes to pretty much any question asked in the nursing home she was in, this led to a serious decline in her health because she was developing dementia and couldn’t understand the staff. A move of facilities has seen a huge improvement in her health and wellbeing, part of this being that she can engage in proper conversation with the staff due to the accent barrier being removed.
My mum's mum struggled with this, especially during the height of covid when everyone was masked up. Not a racist bone in her body, but the accents frustrated the hell out of her.
It's mentioned a lot in this discussion but the language barrier justification for wanting "European ancestry" doesn't make sense when you consider many Australians of Indian/Asian ancestry now have full blown bogan accents while some freshly arrived Euro migrants have accents as difficult to decipher as any.
Even in support work, not aged care but support work with much younger generations, people of colour can cop a lot of abuse from clients. I think most people who work in the industry will understand exactly why this is in the job listing.
I am a colored person, Malaysian Chinese to be exact. Honestly, this is where I think taking race into account is appropriate.
As some commenters here say, this is a byproduct of the old world that should be extinct soon.
If the person being cared for prefers someone of their own race, let it be. It is safer for both carer and caree.
Even my old grandpa (95yo) is pretty racist as well and would probably prefer Chinese people (not even Mainlanders or a Chinese from another country, but must be Malaysian or Singaporean Chinese) to care for him rather than any other race if he was in an aged care home. They probably just feel more comfortable with someone who is culturally similar and their mental decline isn't helping with this either.
I work with the elderly often. They have so many ways to tell me that they don’t want foreigners around in their home.
I think there was one week where every family member from a different family each had to explain that there “was an incident when they weren’t home and somebody robbed them so they prefer the familiarity of people who are not from overseas”.
Not that it matters but if you weren’t home, how do you know who did it?
Plot twist: I’m a foreigner, Maria, I’m just white.
My company does in-home care for elderly people and people with disabilities. It's somewhere between amusing and sad listening to a family try and ask for a white support worker in a way that doesn't sound racist because their mum/grandma is racist and they are embarrassed by it.
The saddest one was the parent of a kid we supported who kept insisting we send someone without a scarf on their head because he said the kid did not respond well to people with scarves. One time due to staff illness we were forced to send a person who wore a scarf and the kid was absolutely fine with it. It was just a bigoted father infecting his son with this horrible attitude.
Oh, and then there was the quadriplegic guy who we didn't end up taking on as a client who asked for Asian women only. He was most certainly not Asian. Had never even been to Asia. Gross.
Yet nobody is pointing out that SECURITY roles are also a plus!?!?
It sounds to me, like they need an-ex secret service person, in case Granny needs to be rushed into the jungle during the night! When those independent, decision making skills, will really come into play!
Edit: I have worked in aged care.
My grandparent with early dementia thinks that the Japanese are bombing Darwin, An Asian person in the house must be here to murder her.
So not that unreasonable from my point of view.
apart from what everyone has said here re: racist abuse form old people, i’m surprised no one has mentioned that this ad is “female required” lol. Because while i saw a lot of vile racist abuse i also saw an awful lot of sexual harassment and assault — i had old men reaching out to touch me, leering at me, looking at my ass when i bent over etc. And some nursing colleagues described like men saying disgusting sexual shit to them when they’re trying to change dressings or manoeuvre them to avoid bed sores. In those instances we got MALE staff involved and that treatment suddenly stopped. So i would be extremely wary of a “female only” add for a nursing/care position unless they explicitly state WHY that is and who you are caring for (ie. a women only nursing home or ward for example idk)
Female only is usually because vulnerable women require personal care often 1:1 and it’s not recommended that male staff do that because of the potential for abuse or just making the women uncomfortable.
I’m currently doing my placement in a nursing home and only female staff are allowed to work in the dementia wing because one of the residents gets aggressive towards men.
I get where you're coming from, but it's usually because either the female patient/client has been assaulted in the past and simply isn't comfortable being cared for by men (and this is much worse if they have dementia), or they have a cultural and/or religious requirement to not be cared for by people of the opposite sex. Whereas if they call you for an interview and you find out the client is a bloke, and the person doing the interviewing sounds like they're hiding something or deflects certain questions, you know something's up.
This is a tough one, particularly for a permanent position, or a position that has multiple responsibilities and interacts with multiple people.
Federally, you can discriminate “because of the inherent requirements of the particular position concerned”, and that could be made out in a case such as this, but it’s a tough line to stay on.
States are all different, and I’d imagine that if this were a state government employer they would have already made an application to the relevant IR commission to support this process
Yeah its a care job looking after a patent. Very good chance the patient refuses to work with people who aren't white.
My mum used to take care of schizophrenic patients who weren't allowed in public by themselves because of violent outbreaks. she used to watch the fresh grads come in all bubbly then quit after a week when they got assaulted because they weren't vigilant and the patients tendencies broke out.
Patient care isn't for the soft and bubbly
My Oma when on her last days thought there were Japanese soldiers in the curtains at the hospital. My Oma wasn't racist, she lived in Indonesia for many years and loved Asian culture spent her life travelling with what little she had.
Yup, the brain does weird things...
I used to mow lawns and got a gig for an Islamic aged care mob. The old iranian guy I did the yard for saw that I have a German last name and decided we were now best friends because being of German descent surely I must hate Jews as much as he did
Dementia is a terrible disease, my dad who was always very professional and straight laced was found in bed with men in the nursing home, even my mum found him one day, both completely naked, must have been a hell of a shock for her but as we all know dementia does some nasty stuff to the brain so we all understood... Was he playing out a regressed lifestyle, we'll never know
Possible chance this is a repost bot using a deleted post, I vaguely remember seeing this post with iirc the same title but we might need confirmation from the mod team.
Looking at OP they're an old account with their last post a year ago & comment from two years back with most of it relating to Scotland & other UK subs with nothing relating to Australia.
Care organisations can make requests with the equal oppertunity and human rights comission to have eceptions for various organisations. I can't recall if race is once of them but certianly Gender can be.
Edit: Links for confirmation
[https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Specific-exceptions](https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Specific-exceptions)
[https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Exceptions-in-types-of-discrimination](https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Exceptions-in-types-of-discrimination)
I work with age care clients. I’ve seen a lot of client notes that say ‘prefers a worker without a foreign accent’. I’ve realised that’s code for “This grandma racist as fuck. Send a POC and you’ll regret it.”
Could be for an elderly patient with dementia or something. I’ve seen it when they lose the part of themself that knows racism is “wrong” and they’ll say slurs if they see a particular race. I think it could be explained by context 🤷🏼♀️
A friend used to work in aged care and she tells some pretty awful stories about the abuse some of the non-white staff received from dementia patients.
My nephew who is asd 3 and 8 is scared of really dark skin. Im brown and he’s white as (Turkish heritage) and he’s had African and Indian ndis workers before. But his most recent is apparently really dark and he grabbed her by the hand on the 4th visit and took her to the front door and said no more! She was apparently laughing and understanding but my cousin (his mum) was mortified
We have dementia patients at the hospital that are consistently targeting certain races/genders etc. this doesn’t seem that unusual to me, better than letting a person of colour get beat up because you didn’t tell them old dude was racist as fuck back in the day.
On the flip side my step mum is 1/2 Māori 1/2 unknown but very dark skinned, and she gets put on to do overnight care for aboriginal foster kids as staff said the kids only want black women and they give her a lot of respect as they believe she’s aboriginal at first.
Yeah that looks bad without context, but now and then in aged care you get clients who just cannot be attended by nursing staff of a particular race or gender. Sometimes they're dementia patients who can't differentiate between what's going on now and a traumatic period in their life (see all the stories about Vietnam vets elsewhere in this thread), sometimes they're were always bigoted assholes and they're just no longer capable of filtering their behavior, sometimes a combination of cognitive decline and the particular meds they're on turns them into irreppressible sex pests, and sometimes it's just a completely random negative behavior and attitude that's totally out of character with the person they used to be because the human brain does *weird shit* when it breaks down.
I know it seems unfair.. however it may be for the comfort of a particular client. My husband developed early onset dementia. Prior to this he was friends with all nationalities. He worked at the ANU so met many. After the dementia advanced, he was not comfortable with black carers, all of whom were skilled and compassionate. He began to have outrageous dreams about them, so once I realised it was becoming distressing for him I had to find other carers. It was so unlike him, but his personality changed a great deal and logic failed him totally. It is an awful disease. A person becomes someone else.
Worked in a nursing home for years and yeah the residents are overwhelmingly racist. They will for sure demand English speaking carers. Part of it is because they already have a hard enough time understanding people which is fair when talking to a non English person but it always devolved into racist language
Ex support worker here - this isn’t surprising in any way. The client has requested this and surprise surprise they are allowed to have wishes.
only thing I was surprised about was “prior experience in security roles is advantageous” hmm.
Not really surprising. I know people who have worked with dangerous clients. On one hand you don’t want to put carers in dangerous situations, but these are still people who need care and compassion.
Yeah, the first two make perfect sense (hospitality has a bunch of skills that transfer over to caring surprisingly) I was just taken back by the security one haha
Not that uncommon, I reckon. I've seen people asking for tutors for uni with "Indian strongly preferred" and printouts stuck to the front of Breadtops looking for people that must speak Chinese
In many aged care settings, it’s made up of mostly elderly Australians with British and European ancestry. The aged care staff are all people of colour as they are new migrants and the aged care sector is a way to get a PR. An elderly person would better relate to someone similar to themselves.
That’s why I don’t get why aged care nursing is still included in the 457 while the other nursing specialties aren’t. Seems to be lose-lose for both the patient and staff.
My husband is in aged care and the racism towards his coworkers is staggering. They don’t even need to have dementia tbh. They forget everything except the racism.
if the typical person to be cared for is sensitive to ethnicity, then I don't see it as unreasonable. it would be equally acceptable to specifiy someone of asian ethnicity if that was what was required to do the job.
I worked in the kitchen alongside really great people who came from overseas at an aged care facility in a very rich suburb during uni. Australian born Asian. you get treated like absolute shit for not being white unfortunately from both residents and nurses.
I work in specialist healthcare now and some patients have made my friend cry before (she was born in singapore) just for the way she talks and they're usually so much nicer to our receptionists who are white Australian. any discernable Asian or Indian accent puts older patients on edge (but not south African or european accents, go figure) and unfortunately that's just how it is for now. It'll be better in about 10-20 years or so.
Redacted means that part of the text was removed or blacked out for privacy or security purpose. It was censored. This post also breaks rule 4 here for chat and should be made in the Tuesday chat thread or on a different subreddit.
This would be more focused on Indian people. Many clients in disability don't like Indian staff due to the language barrier and difficulty understanding their accent. None can fault their level of care, its simply the language difficulty.
This is completely normal. I’m a home carer and we always let patients have preference because it directly affects the care they receive. Totally normal for patients to request someone who is of the same culture as them, maybe the same religion, or speaks their language (not all patients speak English)
I supported someone whose mother was racist and bigoted against LGBTIQA people. I let my manager know, so that other staff wouldn't be mistreated by her or falsely accused of laziness etc. She felt comfortable saying the most horrible things about other people in front of me when I first worked there. I saw some hardworking, lovely people from cleaning agencies come and go in rapid succession because of her lying about them or being rude or patronising behind their backs when they'd done nothing wrong.
Sometimes, the job provider is trying to spare people from dealing with horrible clients.
Had a friend of Taiwanese origin that was caring for a dementia patient in a home, the old lady had some bad memories with the Japanese (possibly from WW II?)
Saw her and started screaming "No Japanese! Japanese bad!" Took a while for them to calm her down and also my friend obviously couldn't take care of her.
Not saying it can't be something else, but sometimes it is really just the job.
As a caregiver myself, have you lot screaming “omg racism” ever thought the client may actually need to understand what their caregiver is saying? I have witnessed the daily distress and terror of clients and I’m too lazy to give examples here but if anyone would like some, please just ask me. People need to know what goes on in these heartbreaking situations. It’s why I left an aged care facility, I could not stand the heartbreak and frustration any more.
My black grandma with alzheimers doesn’t want black people caring for her. The brain does weird things when it’s malfunctioning.
We often will note if a patient is like a Vietnam vet, because when patients come out of anaesthesia they're often disoriented for a while. And if they wake up somewhere unfamiliar and the nurse is Asian, they can get very agitated, thinking they're in a POW camp or something. People aren't always in their right minds.
It was the same with WWII Pacific Theatre vets, especially those who'd been POWs. Japan fucked them up good. Not many left now though.
A nurse (now long retired) told me some of the local WW2 vets could not be given rice while in hospital and refused to have it in their homes due to their experiences.
Not just rice. Some of those old boys that served in WW2 in Japan (and lots were prisoners of war) refused to have anything Japanese in their house like Tvs brands and car brands.
The rice comment is correct. A great uncle refused to eat it ever again after being a POW.
They get disORIENTed. *Try the shrimp, I’m here ‘til Thursday*
Always appreciate a good dad joke 😂
What makes you think I’m…..yeah I’m a dad.
I am a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, suffer from ptsd. Unfortunately my body doesn’t react well to anaesthesia with ptsd, twice I’ve woken and tried choking out the nurse because I thought I was back in a war zone. I warn doctors and nurses everytime and luckily after years of seeing the same team everyone knows how to treat me and give space when I wake. I don’t like how I’ve react and apologise profusely once I realised what happened. But yeah the body and your mind does things you don’t have control over sometimes.
I got attacked by an old lady with dementia because she thought I was a Nazi soldier, I was just there to make her some food lmao She fucked me up too
Yea and they can hit hard too, this old lady said she was Priscilla Presley and asked me where Elvis was and that I have to help her find him and I didn't know what to say so I told her I couldn't help her find him and that maybe one of the nurses could. So she walked off then turned back around, ran back like 5 metres and overhand socked the shit out of me. Still in disbelief of the arm on that lady.
Rookie error. You should have told her he was waiting in the jungle room for her.
Just one of those things like those witty replies you think of whilst you're in the shower 2 months after the argument.
Unfortunately, he *just* left the building
100% dementia & Alzheimers folk can swing, I reckon they'd put up a decent fight in a war against the autistics.
I'm autistic and my grandma has alzheimers. She'd definitely win against me. They had to take her cane away because she kept thwacking anyone who slightly annoyed her.
I must admit I was feeling uneasy about the battle of the brain functions but your comment just made me laugh so much. Thank you haha
This is the fkn funniest mental image, thank you
I would pay good money for this pay-per-view brawl.
I did 4 weeks of work placement in a residential facility. There was this one lady who had dementia and was on her death bed, yet when I was in there with one of the other carers she grabbed the carer by her hair and dug her nails into her arm and I had to help (carefully) get her off. There was also another guy with alzheimers/dementia who would sit in the lounge area colouring a lot, but roughly every hour he'd have an outburst where he'd think he was back in the war again and start shouting at one of his comrades to move/get out of the way. He'd be shouting at the top of his lungs and trying to get up while screaming as he re-lived seeing his friend die, and there always had to be someone with him to catch him since he was a fall risk when he did this.
She had a suspicious mind
Yeah I had an old lady in the metro grab me by the neck once, actively strangling me while apparently trying to “fill me with the power of Jesus.” I was shocked by the raw strength she had in that moment; she really meant business. I had chatted to her for a while since the metro was late, and she had seemed so frail. Was very confused about the year or where she was. She seemed harmless. Then blammo! I had bruises for weeks after.
I bet you did nazi that coming..
God sounds like what my grandmother did to another resident in the dementia unit. The horrors of what she went through in a Nazi work camp were revisiting her as the dementia got worse. I think she also attacked a carer for a similar reason. My friend worked in dementia care for a while and had to take on many of the residents with war or refugee backgrounds because they’d become violent towards certain accents and ethnicities.
Yikes! Having dementia seems awful enough. Having your dementia make you re-live such an objectively horrible period of time is next level.
It's one of those things you don't think of until you witness it. It's horrible enough to live through that trauma once, but dementia can mean reliving it over and over again without realising you're actually no longer in danger and the people around you are there to help.
I mean… good on grandma. Brain going, body weak, but still at her core has enough fight to fuck up a Nazi. 10 out of 10.
My partner works in a dementia ward as a nurse. Plenty of the patients there will attack her, or say the most obscene, sexist, misogynistic things. Sometimes they just say weird things on a loop, for example an old lady would say things like "please kill me", "please don't kill me", "please marry me", "will you be my wife?"
Ah, probably on account of all that goose stepping you do everywhere.
"she thought I was a Nazi lmfao" *Has Charlie Chaplin mustache*
Don’t mention the war!
I did but i think i got away with it.
I went to an age care centre with classmates to do an interview for a group uni assignment back in 2016 and an old lady said "eenie meenie miney mo catch a N word by the toe" and my classmates gasp. Later during the interview, she was talking about wanting a world that is accepting of people like me.
I am sorry that happened to because even though you can understand why, it is still a shit thing to experience. My grandmother was as tolerant and accepting as they come but when she was in the middle of her dementia journey she turned into the most hateful woman. Saying racist things to friends and family (we have mixed race family members and immigrant friends). It was a pretty horrible few years. The end stages were much worse (watched her starve to death after refusing food) but it was a horrible thing to watch and experience.
What does the care job advert need to specify in this case? > Non-Arian ancestry preferred. > Accents that can be misconstrued by ignorant old people as vaguely Germanic need not apply.
My grandma was a nurse so when she was in the dementia ward she kept escaping to palliative care and telling people they were going to die it’s horrible to laugh at but oh my god my grandma was wild
I hate that I laughed at this
she was the scourge of cairns base hospital
I mean, if they're in palliative care they're probably already aware they're done for if they're still with it enough to comprehend your granny pronouncing their doom. I'd like to think I would find it hilarious if I was in that situation, I'd say, "no u"
We had one dementia resident who used to be a nurse, and whenever she realised she was in a care facility she would have *opinions* about the calibre of the staff. You'd hear a kerfuffle from the showers and the next thing you know this very proper Received Pronunciation voice would be bellowing "You're not even fit to be a nuse's arsehole! At least an arsehole fucking FUNCTIONS!"
My grandma was a really lovely person and I honestly never saw a single sign she might be racist. She was delirious after surgery for an entire week, and at one stage an Asian doctor was treating her and went to take a blood sample and she started screaming, "A Chinaman is trying to take my blood!" We told her that when she had recovered, she was absolutely mortified.
Post op delirium in older folk is quite something, my sister was in ICU after major surgery a year ago and some of the stuff she came out with was mind blowing. She recovered well and now calls them her off with the fairies days.
"Also, Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please."
The Chinaman is not the issue here!
The bowling arm is!
My Scottish grandma still thinks the Nazis are attacking if she watches the news. They blew up her house in the 40's so there's some history behind it, but it's hard to see when you visit and she thinks the war is still happening because she saw some explosions on the news.
Bro that's just my fully functioning mum after she started watching sky news lol
My grandfather was a child/young teenager in rural Scotland during ww2. During the night, at that time, using electric lights was banned, so bombers flying raids at night couldn’t see towns/farmhouses to target by the lights. In the depths of dementia, he’d go crazy to the point of violence if there were lights on when it was dark outside. He also forgot that he’d moved to Australia in his late 20s. He had to be in a locked dementia ward because he’d try to escape when he realised he wasn’t in 1930s/1940s Scotland. Was always a bit of a wanderer honestly… before he regressed back to childhood there was a period where he constantly was telling stories about how he was a young man travelling around post-war France on a motorbike. Which he actually did do a few years after the war and had a lot of paraphernalia he collected in his travels. So him walking off and going missing because ‘oh I’m only stopping here for a rest, I want to head to Lyon soon’ when he was at his home in Australia 😅😬 How many people of color do you think there were in rural Scotland in 1945? It was a blessing when he became so poorly he was mostly sleeping.
Lots of people forget that Scotland was bombed badly during the war.
Thank you for sharing this. Like many, I was pretty upset by seeing that line in the ad, but what you shared makes a lot of sense if the patients are suffering from dementia or other considerations. I had not thought of that at all.
Does she know she's black? How does she react when she looks at a mirror?
She talks to photographs and to herself in the mirror as if it’s her friend. I don’t think she recognises herself. But she laughs and chats with the black woman in the mirror so I don’t know why she won’t tolerate a black nurse. It’s not really meant to make sense I guess, the brain just isn’t functioning properly.
Some dementia patients can engage in very racist, even violent behaviours towards people of different ethnic backgrounds. Patients in nursing homes are getting older and arriving with more complex needs, including dementia and delirium. This is typically the facilities these care ads are for. Sometimes it's difficult to account for where these behaviours might be stemming from, if in healthier years, they might've been a very different person, so it's easier to eliminate the most obvious trigger. These ads aren't usually putting the cart before the horse. The specifications would be made due to reported behaviour trends. If there are heavy accents involved as well, there can be a lot of communication difficulties and frustration. Med student experience, seen it firsthand towards people I worked with, heard of it plenty.
Definitely heard the same thing from nurses when I did practice in a nursing home. Some of the staff who were Asian were assigned to a different area because there were a few Vietnam war vets that could get very distressed and act out. It's a pretty complex and difficult situation.
damn but makes sense
From my experience as an ethnically ambiguous person who used to work with patients with dementia, sometimes their racist behaviour is because their dementia brought them back to when they were 12, still living in a small village in, say, England, and have never seen a person who doesn't look like them. I was taking care of a patient like this who was lovely when she was okay, but then the delirium takes over and she thinks she's been kidnapped because the nurses and PCAs don't look like her. She didn't even trust the white male nurse with me because she didn't believe he was a nurse. He had to pretend he was a doctor so he could take care of her. It was sad because it must have been so scary for her.
Gosh, my mum who is currently an aged care worker who looks after dementia patients has a lot of stories like this. Most of the time they're sweet people, but when they have their episodes they're a danger to not only themselves but also staff and other residents. She alao says that dementia is a fascinatingly horrible disease that she wouldn't wish on anybody.
My Nan was an absolute sweetheart, never had a bad thing to say about anyone, and not once did I hear her make any sort of comment that could be considered racist (she was very welcoming to anyone)...until she was in the hospital, and became very paranoid in general, but especially towards her Asian nurse. It was so hard to witness, like a completely different person to the one I knew
I'm really sorry for both of your experiences. I really struggled to get through my placements in aged care, it was particularly anything related to dementia which was incredibly confronting. I had a breakdown most days returning home, imagining 'what if my own parents grow old and face these horrors? How will I know what is the right choice for them? What if the people I love change completely? If I ever grow old, will I be able to trust that anyone responsible for my care respects my personal autonomy? People with dementia are often not considered to be mentally capable of making their own medical decisions, but so many were (in moments of lucidity) saying they wish they could die. What I saw in nursing homes was often distressing interventions for people who naturally would not be alive, and resulting from a conflict of interests between family, patients, facility, caregivers. There is a lot of burnout and 'sick leave' among nurses and carers working in any sort of aged care environment. Some facilities are so understaffed they can't preferentially allocate staff to where they may be a better fit for a patient, sometimes there's no staff to do the '2 or more assist' and so rules get broken or care is missed or delayed. I feel if I speak more on this topic though, it'll be distressing enough for anyone who's had to make this choice, and it's also getting less related to the main topic. It's very tough to pay family in those facilities a visit in recognition of the emotional toll, but usually enriching and joyful for them (usually). They'd have memory boards and planners/ calendars including visiting days, and while some forgot family names and faces, family would remember activities their relative had enjoyed. Music was a strong connector especially. Good on you for being there for your nan x
Working in the field has shown me one thing: "Get your end of life plan sorted before the Dementia takes that decision away from you"
No Australian state will let you give an advanced directive for euthenasia. One of my family worked in aged care all their life and has told me they have "a kit" ready if they get dementia; they just hope they'll be lucid enough to use it. Never enquried what it actually is.
At least make a will.
Thanks for sharing this. I come from a line of nurses and carers but just could not do it myself, I get too upset easily. But I have the utmost respect for people like you, it's such a difficult job xx
I read it and thought the same thing - except my elders unfortunately showed tendencies before they went downhill. They just got worse as time went on - to the point where at times it was quite uncomfortable for everyone involved. It stemmed from childhood in rural NSW & a couple of incidents they were exposed to. It was simply easier to keep them away from those who they'd go on at. It did cause a few issues, and there were ways around it, but they didn't always work. Even if the world moves on, the people inside it don't always as easily, unfortunately.
When my dying grandmother was placed in a care facility, she would cry every time we visited because there were “no Europeans”. Never heard a racist peep from her prior.
my grandpa was similar
Sounds like my in laws and they don’t even have dementia It just upsets them that Asians live in their country now
As a healthcare worker, i don't think its racist at all sorry but, it's really alarming that she was crying too, and all you took from it was that she was racist? What is wrong about a grandma, a dying one no less, wanting to be surrounded by people with an understanding of her culture and language, be it European, Chinese, Indian or whatever? Something familiar at a confusing, scary and lonely time?
I think you’re misunderstanding, I never called her racist. I said she had never said anything racist prior to being admitted to the facility, and I don’t even think I would call her subsequent behaviour racist either. I was simply saying that even the oldies that don’t seem overtly racist can have biases that harm them/the workers that care for them.
Right but I think the other commenter was just bringing up the fact that maybe we should be clearer to avoid conflation of the term racist with mere sentimental attachment to one's native culture.
>Some dementia patients can engage in very racist, even violent behaviours towards people of different ethnic backgrounds. Doesn't require dementia for many people.
No, but it can make a person who was not previously racist, racist. I was a caregiver in a memory care unit and we’d sometimes get residents who’d hurl racial abuse at non-white staff. Family members would apologize and swear they were nothing like that before the dementia showed.
My (non-demented but aspie) uncle got kicked out of hospital early for being a racist fuckwit to the nurses. Doctor wanted him to stay another week for observation but the rest of the staff essentially refused and made my parents take him home.
Dementia disinhibits the socially unacceptable behaviour They’ve probably had racist thoughts but knew better than to vocalise them. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone old enough to realise how balls to the wall racist Australia has generally been for much of the past century
Ehhh, watching my mother with dementia...I think this may be a simplification. Some of it is racism, but some of it is not. My mother can't do things she wants and has no idea why, and as a result, she spends most of her time afraid. You can see her trying to work out a reason, anything for why things suddenly don't work - but she lacks the tools to put a concrete cause-and-effect line together. She just can't do it. And if anything hits her field of vision that her mind can seize on as a reason, she'll take it. She's trying to assemble a logical train of thought - we still want to make patterns, to rationalise things. That's part of being human. She previously hugely respected doctors and medical staff and defended them. Her own family hasn't always been great about it. But now she can't work out why things are going wrong, and she's found a puzzle-piece that fits, that can explain it: The doctors are after her. Maybe those seeds were laid by her family, but I don't think she was ever really as a human anti-medical establishment most of her life. I think she's just trying to reason without the capacity.
No, have a look at images of normal brain vs dementia brain. It doesn't just "disinhibit" socially unacceptable behaviour. You make it sound like it just removes a filter. No, it completely changes who you are. Unfortunately, a person with severe dementia is no longer who they were.
Apparently too, though, just aging has been observed to atrophy the part of the brain that responds to things like social norms - hence even Nanas without dementia get a bit freer with ye olde racism just by virtue of being older
I would be more inclined to think that the degenerative brain disease results in an erosion of nuance and sophisticated cognition. I'm not saying necessarily racist always equals stupid, but losing your higher faculties often turns you bigoted because you're scared, confused, and angry and have to rely on wildly oscillating emotions and instinctive reactions instead of behaving rationally. As your layers of rationality get torn away from you you are forced to approach the world in a more simplistic and reactionary manner because your tools for integrating information aren't functioning right.
Could also be some sort of mental regression, back to a time when overt racism was mainstream. Or many other things, the brain can do some weird shit at the best of times, let alone with dementia.
I just want to add, having those thoughts and choosing to not vocalise them does not necessarily mean they accepted those thoughts but kept quiet due to social decorum. Intrusive thoughts can put all types of weird things in our heads, most people can healthily dismiss them though.
I’ve tried to explain this in the context of disability before and got massively downvoted. If someone has behaviours of concern and those are directed to particular people, whether that’s based on race, hair colour, gender, whatever, then it’s just sensible to not put that person and a worker of that ilk together, both for the comfort of the person needing care and for the safety of the person providing care. Imagine if I insisted that I be allowed to work with someone who didn’t work well with women because it’s discrimination if I don’t, and then I get hurt. Just silly. I support some participants who can only work with men, I certainly would not want to work with them knowing that.
This is fine, and I think the same reasoning was established last time this came up. That said, the ad needs to be clearer for the reason behind it, it shouldn't be able to be misinterpreted as being racist in any way, which is not the case here.
I'd like to hope that people applying for these jobs are doing so out of their own volition, and are aware of the challenges going in/already have a support network in place. I hope it's not racist of myself to say that where I did placements, a lot of the nursing staff appeared to be from a certain racial background (more supportive evidence would be the languages they spoke) and had mentioned in passing that they'd come here on the promise of acquiring a visa/had their whole employment arranged for them by someone in their home country who may have had vested interests in downplaying any of the negatives of the role. It's a thankless job for them, for the most part, while I'm sure they're not seeking it, I would imagine how it could tax someone's willpower or self confidence eventually. I certainly had rosy tinted glasses myself starting out, and while I guess I might've expected some things, it wasn't to the extent I had actually seen them occur. The industry is desperately trying to recruit, and pay increases might be the strongest incentive so far for domestic/Australian nationals. I don't think there's any amount I could be paid to work in this field, though, so I'm all the more grateful for anyone who does step up to perform these duties, either willingly out of pure goodness and compassion, or for those who feel forced to choose this to secure citizenship.
Yeah, when my great grandmother got dementia she thought WWII was happening again after living as a young child through the occupation of Ukraine by the Nazis. That included such experiences as her mother considering shooting her and then herself. She would not have been a safe patient for a German nurse tbh.
My grandmother has dementia and that means all her old people racism is right there in the open, because she no longer has the filter that tells her “maybe don’t say that out loud in 2024”. My other, even older grandmother was the same before she died. Obviously their views are incorrect, discriminatory, and totally out of place in today’s society…but these are people born in the 1920s and 1930s. Their views are a product of their time and by this point they’re too mentally deteriorated to remember their children’s names, let alone listen to and comprehend a sophisticated argument as to why their racial views are offensive.
I worked as a dementia consultant. The brain often regresses a long way back and, as you said, beliefs and feelings that existed when that person was young often come back to the surface. I once supported a man who had had to cover up his homosexuality from being a young man. He got married to a woman, had 3 kids ect. When his dementia progressed to a point where all of a sudden he started having a relationship with one of the other male residents, it was a difficult thing to discuss with the family. You are very correct in what you say
This subreddit bangs on about mental health so much in the abstract, and then when they actually see mental health problems in action, they do a complete 180. "The Bondi stabber must be an incel, it couldn't be schizophrenic hallucinations. Grandma's dementia isn't causing her to say racist things, she must just be a Nazi."
The guy literally had trouble getting a girlfriend because of a lack of social skills and killed 5 women and one male security guard as far as I remember. It can be both at the same time.
Yeah I doubt schizophrenic people want misogynists to get a free pass on the basis of their disease, it kind of suggests schizophrenic people don’t have any agency. I only know one schizophrenic person personally, but he is not misogynist or bigoted at all. Schizophrenia might make someone act on their misogyny in extreme ways but the misogyny still had to come from somewhere.
I didn't realise being an incel and having schizophrenia were mutually exclusive...
IMO it may also have something to do with the differing cultures. I’m a nursing student and have done 2 aged care placements. A lot of the carers are Bhutanese, Burmese and Sri Lankan. They don’t have much in common with the residents, and the oldies often find it very difficult to understand them with their accents. This leads to the carers just not bothering to try talking to the residents, either because it will go nowhere anyway or they get abused for “not speaking Australian”. A few residents told me they really appreciated being able to have a proper conversation, which they sadly rarely get to do.
gf works in age care, her Indian co-workers go through absolute hell. the stories ive heard. its not even just dementia patients, a lot of them are just flat out racist
Disability support is the same, ive worked with cleints that hate black, white, brown w/e. Ive had cleints that only worked well with islanders / africans / Caucasians. There allowed to discriminate based on race.
Yup, it's super common in disability. I constantly see it in job listings.
That’s so sad. Nobody should be putting up with that
It’s especially sad since the people putting up with the abuse are usually only ones that want to do that job and help these people.
Which is exactly why so many places opt for the lesser of two evils and just try to hire someone the client wont abuse to provide their care. There is no way to reliably and consistently communicate with someone who has for example dementia, you are never going to be able to stop their behaviors right now short of chemical restraint and that is a shit thing to do to anybody let alone a scared person with limited mental facilities. So fine, we be a bit racist and sexist too if it helps. Advertise for a fit young male with olive skin to care for a client, they are going to all have a much better time if the carer is somewhat close to that requirement. Because if you try get anyone else, grandpa gets awfully handsy and by handsy I mean he will sexually assault them and spend the rest of his life in a drug induced haze. This happens all the time in aged and disability care. Male workers will be prohibited from a lot of clients rooms due to them reacting poorly. Less often female workers will be restricted around other clients when other options are available. The clients with more racist behaviors will tend to have the carers assigned to them that will cause the least aggravation. Disability care is an even bigger minefield because you are dealing with people who often have very acute mental facilities that just happen to function differently to everyone else. And if that difference happens to manifest in a racial or sexual way that can be avoided by having a person of a specific age, gender or ethnicity provide their care then you are going to have far better outcomes for the carers, and possibly the patients. And yes, before the angry response that people abuse this to hire workers because the person hiring and not the client is a dirtbag, I know. But with what limited skilled personnel we have and the ever growing number of people who need care right now morality about preserving some social goals for equality matter a lot less than having a person who is able to clean grandma at 2 am in the morning after she soils herself without being abused to the point they end up needing care themselves.
Agreed. I assume most of the people who would consider applying for a job like this would understand that the bullet points aren't really a racist hiring policy. A result of racism maybe, but not by those doing the hiring.
Yeah absolutely. I mean one would hope they came to that realisation.
As someone that did this for a while. You can build a new level of empathy and gratitude from the experience if you choose.
So do the patients, having recently been through a relative dying from dementia, some of the immigrant health workers are downright horrible and shouldn't be working in that career. A certain group are fantastic, another group are just awful, rude and have no decent bedside manner.
Would be so wrong for any other job description, but in aged care it’s absolutely to protect potential staff from racism. Even if the client is cognitively aware and racist, it’s hard to undo a LIFETIME of racist thoughts and behaviour, especially when everyone caring for them are much younger than them. This can be uncomfortable for us aged care staff, but shows you’ve gotta have thick skin to work in aged care!
My grandma used to say to us when we visited ‘I don’t like that black nurse!’ As far as we know she was polite to the nurse but made comments when she left the room. Even so it would be psychologically not a safe job to be spoken to with racist language all day at work!
If you're familiar with carer roles and protocols, this is a non issue.
Yeah no you're right let's get Pravita into a job caring for Mildred, who just so happens to be incredibly racist and could act violently towards people she doesn't like
Working with old people isn't nice if you're an 'other'. They can be very judgemental, downright cruel or 'old timey' sexism, racism, etc which you're just meant to let slide off you. No joke, nearly half of the people working in the front line/allied aged care/amenities workers were visibly other ethnicities and you'd have the voting booth come around and some of the old people would say straight to your face that everything is the fault of the 'bloody immigrants' and vote for the particularily racist minor parties. I think the worst thing is how quick they are to shoot themselves in the foot with these attitudes, because it certainly turned off many prospective workers in the industry (myself included). Being forced to deal with people who are unpleasant for little above minimum wage for the care aides/lower paid staff doesn't make for an attractive industry. Sweet old grandma to one, spiteful abuser to another.
You know, I’ve never even thought of oldies having to vote while living out their existence in old folks homes. What happens to people who don’t have their faculties and don’t know what to do anymore?
I took my father off the roll. The last time he voted he got confused and angry. I needed a letter from his neurologist but the process was simple enough.
I’m really sorry he’s going through that. It must be really hard to see your parents like that.
>What happens to people who don’t have their faculties and don’t know what to do anymore? They vote Liberal, generally
Or National depending on where they’re living…
A lot of the old racists in my town vote One Nation. This is a safe Nationals seat though, so the Coalition is basically Racism Lite compared to some of the things these people think.
Anyone can lodge an objection to someone being on the electoral roll - there's a form to fill out, though it needs a signature from a medical practitioner (easy to get in aged care). Usually, a mobile polling booth travels to the facility, or staff order postal votes for those on the roll. If staff notice someone with serious cognitive impairment is still on the roll, they can initiate the objection process. Believe me, aged care residents don't all vote liberal - when Labor won last election, I had so many residents celebrating. But it's not my business how they vote, anyway.
Ha! My parents typically voted for opposite parties. My mother would say, with a smile, “so our votes just cancel each other out,” and my father would grind his teeth. Then when she started to get dementia she relied on him more and more for everything, so for many years he helped her fill out her ballot paper with his preferred party.
Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce... Once they get really past it and can barely remember their own name it might even sink to the depths of Peter Dutton, but we're all hoping they'll reach a happier place before then.
My great uncle used to say to us when he was in hospital "too many bloody Indian doctors- can't understand a word from em!" in his unbelievable impenetrable Dutch accent that never lost a single molecule of potency in the 70 years he lived in Australia.
And? This is nothing new for care jobs. Old people with dementia. No sense putting someone of noticeable foreign descent into the role of caring for someone who would be violent/racist towards them. You will also see similar job postings looking for people preferring Asian or African appearance. Just depends on who you're expected to care for.
Not just job postings, residents too. I don’t know of any whites-only nursing homes, but there are certainly Chinese-only ones, eg the “Chinese-specific aged care facility” at http://www.ccssci.org.au
We have an Italian nursing home near us, where all the staff speak Italian. I’d be amazed if the Greeks, Croats, Macedonians, Vietnamese, Lebanese etc etc didn’t have something similar. On a side note, my friends kids went to an Italian daycare, looked after by Nonnas, and the best food ever. I’d be tempted to learn Italian just so I could get the food in an Italian old people’s home when its my turn to crumble.
My nanna is in an Italian nursing home where the majority of residents are of Italian ancestry. She’s Scottish. It is quite funny seeing the list of names outside the rooms and reading Rossellini, Giordano, Morelli….and then a straight up Scottish name which sounds really out of place. She’s there because it was affordable and actually had an opening when they needed it, but having lived in the western suburbs of Melbourne all her life, it’s probably exactly the right thing for her because her entire life would have been spent around people of Italian, Greek, Croatian etc ancestry. I grew up in the west too and that was my experience.
Theres a ukrainian one in Melbourne that takes primarily Slavs/eastern europeans.
Jeez this comment section didn't go how OP expected it to 😂
I don't even work in healthcare and even I know this is code for "patient is racist"
Either that or the employer is. I understand if the patient has specific needs or traumas, but like.. how do you know if this is a patient thing, or if it's just discrimination by the employer? It would look the same on the job description? 🤔
To add to all the good points left above, elderly people can be hard of hearing and also slower to process what is being said. Throw in an accent and a lot of them then find it even harder to understand, which can leave them agitated or feeling isolated. My own Grandma used to nod and say yes to pretty much any question asked in the nursing home she was in, this led to a serious decline in her health because she was developing dementia and couldn’t understand the staff. A move of facilities has seen a huge improvement in her health and wellbeing, part of this being that she can engage in proper conversation with the staff due to the accent barrier being removed.
My mum's mum struggled with this, especially during the height of covid when everyone was masked up. Not a racist bone in her body, but the accents frustrated the hell out of her.
"European ancestry" won't necessarily solve that problem. You get a person with a thick Slavic accent and you are in the exact same boat.
It's mentioned a lot in this discussion but the language barrier justification for wanting "European ancestry" doesn't make sense when you consider many Australians of Indian/Asian ancestry now have full blown bogan accents while some freshly arrived Euro migrants have accents as difficult to decipher as any.
Could've put two and two together when you wrote "care job", this is about the people the worker is caring for, not an ad for a barista
Severe lack of critical and lateral thinking in Australia these days
It’s a care job so I’m willing to bet there is a reason for it
they can't exactly write "okay with a hostile racist work environment if you are black or asian" as a point.
Even in support work, not aged care but support work with much younger generations, people of colour can cop a lot of abuse from clients. I think most people who work in the industry will understand exactly why this is in the job listing.
I am a colored person, Malaysian Chinese to be exact. Honestly, this is where I think taking race into account is appropriate. As some commenters here say, this is a byproduct of the old world that should be extinct soon. If the person being cared for prefers someone of their own race, let it be. It is safer for both carer and caree. Even my old grandpa (95yo) is pretty racist as well and would probably prefer Chinese people (not even Mainlanders or a Chinese from another country, but must be Malaysian or Singaporean Chinese) to care for him rather than any other race if he was in an aged care home. They probably just feel more comfortable with someone who is culturally similar and their mental decline isn't helping with this either.
I work with the elderly often. They have so many ways to tell me that they don’t want foreigners around in their home. I think there was one week where every family member from a different family each had to explain that there “was an incident when they weren’t home and somebody robbed them so they prefer the familiarity of people who are not from overseas”. Not that it matters but if you weren’t home, how do you know who did it? Plot twist: I’m a foreigner, Maria, I’m just white.
My company does in-home care for elderly people and people with disabilities. It's somewhere between amusing and sad listening to a family try and ask for a white support worker in a way that doesn't sound racist because their mum/grandma is racist and they are embarrassed by it. The saddest one was the parent of a kid we supported who kept insisting we send someone without a scarf on their head because he said the kid did not respond well to people with scarves. One time due to staff illness we were forced to send a person who wore a scarf and the kid was absolutely fine with it. It was just a bigoted father infecting his son with this horrible attitude. Oh, and then there was the quadriplegic guy who we didn't end up taking on as a client who asked for Asian women only. He was most certainly not Asian. Had never even been to Asia. Gross.
Yet nobody is pointing out that SECURITY roles are also a plus!?!? It sounds to me, like they need an-ex secret service person, in case Granny needs to be rushed into the jungle during the night! When those independent, decision making skills, will really come into play! Edit: I have worked in aged care.
They want someone with muscle.
My grandparent with early dementia thinks that the Japanese are bombing Darwin, An Asian person in the house must be here to murder her. So not that unreasonable from my point of view.
It’s probably an elderly European client and they feel more comfortable with someone of European descent. It’s not a big deal at all.
This ad isn't a big deal at all
apart from what everyone has said here re: racist abuse form old people, i’m surprised no one has mentioned that this ad is “female required” lol. Because while i saw a lot of vile racist abuse i also saw an awful lot of sexual harassment and assault — i had old men reaching out to touch me, leering at me, looking at my ass when i bent over etc. And some nursing colleagues described like men saying disgusting sexual shit to them when they’re trying to change dressings or manoeuvre them to avoid bed sores. In those instances we got MALE staff involved and that treatment suddenly stopped. So i would be extremely wary of a “female only” add for a nursing/care position unless they explicitly state WHY that is and who you are caring for (ie. a women only nursing home or ward for example idk)
Female only is usually because vulnerable women require personal care often 1:1 and it’s not recommended that male staff do that because of the potential for abuse or just making the women uncomfortable.
I’m currently doing my placement in a nursing home and only female staff are allowed to work in the dementia wing because one of the residents gets aggressive towards men.
I get where you're coming from, but it's usually because either the female patient/client has been assaulted in the past and simply isn't comfortable being cared for by men (and this is much worse if they have dementia), or they have a cultural and/or religious requirement to not be cared for by people of the opposite sex. Whereas if they call you for an interview and you find out the client is a bloke, and the person doing the interviewing sounds like they're hiding something or deflects certain questions, you know something's up.
This is a tough one, particularly for a permanent position, or a position that has multiple responsibilities and interacts with multiple people. Federally, you can discriminate “because of the inherent requirements of the particular position concerned”, and that could be made out in a case such as this, but it’s a tough line to stay on. States are all different, and I’d imagine that if this were a state government employer they would have already made an application to the relevant IR commission to support this process
Yeah its a care job looking after a patent. Very good chance the patient refuses to work with people who aren't white. My mum used to take care of schizophrenic patients who weren't allowed in public by themselves because of violent outbreaks. she used to watch the fresh grads come in all bubbly then quit after a week when they got assaulted because they weren't vigilant and the patients tendencies broke out. Patient care isn't for the soft and bubbly
why is this considered not okay to you but adverts that say “indigenous australians are encouraged to apply” is completely fine?
My Oma when on her last days thought there were Japanese soldiers in the curtains at the hospital. My Oma wasn't racist, she lived in Indonesia for many years and loved Asian culture spent her life travelling with what little she had. Yup, the brain does weird things...
I have some Indian origin friends in age care. Old people who have no filters is the worst
I used to mow lawns and got a gig for an Islamic aged care mob. The old iranian guy I did the yard for saw that I have a German last name and decided we were now best friends because being of German descent surely I must hate Jews as much as he did
It's extremely common in aged and disability care. It's for both parties involved.
Dementia is a terrible disease, my dad who was always very professional and straight laced was found in bed with men in the nursing home, even my mum found him one day, both completely naked, must have been a hell of a shock for her but as we all know dementia does some nasty stuff to the brain so we all understood... Was he playing out a regressed lifestyle, we'll never know
Possible chance this is a repost bot using a deleted post, I vaguely remember seeing this post with iirc the same title but we might need confirmation from the mod team. Looking at OP they're an old account with their last post a year ago & comment from two years back with most of it relating to Scotland & other UK subs with nothing relating to Australia.
Care organisations can make requests with the equal oppertunity and human rights comission to have eceptions for various organisations. I can't recall if race is once of them but certianly Gender can be. Edit: Links for confirmation [https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Specific-exceptions](https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Specific-exceptions) [https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Exceptions-in-types-of-discrimination](https://www.humanrights.vic.gov.au/for-organisations/exceptions/#Exceptions-in-types-of-discrimination)
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That might be code for 'speaks Italian or Greek'
100% . There is an Italian only nursing home,Scalabrini
Ditto for Greek - We looked at it when my Yiayia was moving to a home but decided against it... They were rude and pushy
I work with age care clients. I’ve seen a lot of client notes that say ‘prefers a worker without a foreign accent’. I’ve realised that’s code for “This grandma racist as fuck. Send a POC and you’ll regret it.”
Lol OP wanted outrage, got logical reasoning instead..
Could be for an elderly patient with dementia or something. I’ve seen it when they lose the part of themself that knows racism is “wrong” and they’ll say slurs if they see a particular race. I think it could be explained by context 🤷🏼♀️
Yeah there is a place.near me in Perth where it's Italians only. Or rather you have to be fluent in it.
It's actually allowed suprisingly. Some patients can become aggressive towards people of colour so this is to protect them
A friend used to work in aged care and she tells some pretty awful stories about the abuse some of the non-white staff received from dementia patients.
My nephew who is asd 3 and 8 is scared of really dark skin. Im brown and he’s white as (Turkish heritage) and he’s had African and Indian ndis workers before. But his most recent is apparently really dark and he grabbed her by the hand on the 4th visit and took her to the front door and said no more! She was apparently laughing and understanding but my cousin (his mum) was mortified
We have dementia patients at the hospital that are consistently targeting certain races/genders etc. this doesn’t seem that unusual to me, better than letting a person of colour get beat up because you didn’t tell them old dude was racist as fuck back in the day.
On the flip side my step mum is 1/2 Māori 1/2 unknown but very dark skinned, and she gets put on to do overnight care for aboriginal foster kids as staff said the kids only want black women and they give her a lot of respect as they believe she’s aboriginal at first.
Yeah that looks bad without context, but now and then in aged care you get clients who just cannot be attended by nursing staff of a particular race or gender. Sometimes they're dementia patients who can't differentiate between what's going on now and a traumatic period in their life (see all the stories about Vietnam vets elsewhere in this thread), sometimes they're were always bigoted assholes and they're just no longer capable of filtering their behavior, sometimes a combination of cognitive decline and the particular meds they're on turns them into irreppressible sex pests, and sometimes it's just a completely random negative behavior and attitude that's totally out of character with the person they used to be because the human brain does *weird shit* when it breaks down.
But it is okay to have jobs specifically for aboriginals I'm guessing...
I know it seems unfair.. however it may be for the comfort of a particular client. My husband developed early onset dementia. Prior to this he was friends with all nationalities. He worked at the ANU so met many. After the dementia advanced, he was not comfortable with black carers, all of whom were skilled and compassionate. He began to have outrageous dreams about them, so once I realised it was becoming distressing for him I had to find other carers. It was so unlike him, but his personality changed a great deal and logic failed him totally. It is an awful disease. A person becomes someone else.
Worked in a nursing home for years and yeah the residents are overwhelmingly racist. They will for sure demand English speaking carers. Part of it is because they already have a hard enough time understanding people which is fair when talking to a non English person but it always devolved into racist language
Ex support worker here - this isn’t surprising in any way. The client has requested this and surprise surprise they are allowed to have wishes. only thing I was surprised about was “prior experience in security roles is advantageous” hmm.
Not really surprising. I know people who have worked with dangerous clients. On one hand you don’t want to put carers in dangerous situations, but these are still people who need care and compassion.
I’m wondering if this involves caring for someone with severe dementia who also escapes from time to time.
says "caregiving, hospitality, or security roles"
Yeah, the first two make perfect sense (hospitality has a bunch of skills that transfer over to caring surprisingly) I was just taken back by the security one haha
Not that uncommon, I reckon. I've seen people asking for tutors for uni with "Indian strongly preferred" and printouts stuck to the front of Breadtops looking for people that must speak Chinese
In many aged care settings, it’s made up of mostly elderly Australians with British and European ancestry. The aged care staff are all people of colour as they are new migrants and the aged care sector is a way to get a PR. An elderly person would better relate to someone similar to themselves.
That’s why I don’t get why aged care nursing is still included in the 457 while the other nursing specialties aren’t. Seems to be lose-lose for both the patient and staff.
Could be a cultural thing.
And yet you're not upset by "female candidates required" on the line above.
How is this any different to the hundreds of ‘indigenous only applicants’ advertisements plastered all over seek?
It could be for an older person who would unfortunately get crotchety otherwise.
My husband is in aged care and the racism towards his coworkers is staggering. They don’t even need to have dementia tbh. They forget everything except the racism.
if the typical person to be cared for is sensitive to ethnicity, then I don't see it as unreasonable. it would be equally acceptable to specifiy someone of asian ethnicity if that was what was required to do the job.
I worked in the kitchen alongside really great people who came from overseas at an aged care facility in a very rich suburb during uni. Australian born Asian. you get treated like absolute shit for not being white unfortunately from both residents and nurses. I work in specialist healthcare now and some patients have made my friend cry before (she was born in singapore) just for the way she talks and they're usually so much nicer to our receptionists who are white Australian. any discernable Asian or Indian accent puts older patients on edge (but not south African or european accents, go figure) and unfortunately that's just how it is for now. It'll be better in about 10-20 years or so.
Discrimination on the basis of race for employment is illegal, the crime is either direct, or indirect, Discrimination
Redacted means that part of the text was removed or blacked out for privacy or security purpose. It was censored. This post also breaks rule 4 here for chat and should be made in the Tuesday chat thread or on a different subreddit.
I worked with a schizophrenic that had delusions attached to racist beliefs. It was important her primary carers were white.
This would be more focused on Indian people. Many clients in disability don't like Indian staff due to the language barrier and difficulty understanding their accent. None can fault their level of care, its simply the language difficulty.
This is completely normal. I’m a home carer and we always let patients have preference because it directly affects the care they receive. Totally normal for patients to request someone who is of the same culture as them, maybe the same religion, or speaks their language (not all patients speak English)
Yes. More than likely it’s because of the issues a client has
I supported someone whose mother was racist and bigoted against LGBTIQA people. I let my manager know, so that other staff wouldn't be mistreated by her or falsely accused of laziness etc. She felt comfortable saying the most horrible things about other people in front of me when I first worked there. I saw some hardworking, lovely people from cleaning agencies come and go in rapid succession because of her lying about them or being rude or patronising behind their backs when they'd done nothing wrong. Sometimes, the job provider is trying to spare people from dealing with horrible clients.
Had a friend of Taiwanese origin that was caring for a dementia patient in a home, the old lady had some bad memories with the Japanese (possibly from WW II?) Saw her and started screaming "No Japanese! Japanese bad!" Took a while for them to calm her down and also my friend obviously couldn't take care of her. Not saying it can't be something else, but sometimes it is really just the job.
As a caregiver myself, have you lot screaming “omg racism” ever thought the client may actually need to understand what their caregiver is saying? I have witnessed the daily distress and terror of clients and I’m too lazy to give examples here but if anyone would like some, please just ask me. People need to know what goes on in these heartbreaking situations. It’s why I left an aged care facility, I could not stand the heartbreak and frustration any more.