Until now.
Now, the company is experimenting with machine learning, a subset of AI, with algorithms borrowed from the aviation and fast-moving consumer goods industries. These now rewrite all the aged carers’ schedules to dictate which carers visit which clients to maximise efficiencies, regardless of how suited they are and the years they’ve been together.
Loading
As a result, my nonagenarian father has lost the young woman to whom he became so attached, and she has been banished elsewhere to get to know a completely different set of people. When she and my father, by chance, bumped into each other in a shopping centre one day, and had a teary reunion, it nearly broke my heart.
An elderly neighbour similarly started sobbing when she was told she would no longer be seeing the care worker she’d come to know, and become so fond of, over the past four years. And another carer has been so devastated to have her regular visits to another beloved client axed, she’s threatening to leave altogether.
Yet when we’ve all protested, we’re told, sorry, it’s now AI running the show, and it’s impossible to overwrite, or deviate from, what the computer says.
Loading
At the top, Prue Bowden, the company’s CEO, Home Health, insists this new reliance on algorithms to deliver care, which started this year, is simply necessary. “It takes courage to innovate in sectors that are in need of change,” she says. “While I hear and appreciate and acknowledge that there is some negative feedback, these changes have delivered real benefits to customers and staff and are all about preparing the sector for a very significant demography shift that’s coming.”
Of course, that’s a fair point. We’re confronting an ageing population and it is going to become exceedingly expensive to deliver more care to the Baby Boomer bump, which make efficiencies necessary.
As Bowden says, jettisoning the old one-on-one care for a business model of team-based care, where algorithms make the decisions, is about the necessary modernisation of the aged-care sector and its increasing complexity and preparing for greater scale for the future.
“There’s always resistance to change, but we’ve had some good feedback,” she says. “The reality is that people resisting the change are the loudest.”
I disagree. My dad, like his neighbours who are distraught about the loss of some of the most treasured figures in their lives, aren’t loud people. They’re elderly, they’re fragile, they feel absolutely helpless, and they express themselves in tears more than angry words.
There are only two hearts in this photo. Credit: Getty Images
Most of them, moreover, are afraid to complain, fearing that, if they do, they’ll lose whatever carers the algorithms deign to bequeath them.
Naturally, few have any idea what AI and machine learning actually are. But they do know that they’ve robbed them of some of their most beautiful friendships, which had conferred meaning and pleasure and, to what time they have left, a reason to get up in the morning.
Sue Williams is a Sydney-based freelance travel writer, author and journalist.