A Dunedin woman, whose mother is in a dementia facility, said patients were being sent out of the city due to a lack of space, and she found it "appalling".
"The assessor says there’s such a shortage of dementia places in Dunedin people are being sent to Invercargill and Christchurch.
"You need to visit loved ones with dementia frequently, and for short visits ... If someone’s in Christchurch you’re going to be driving all the way there. It’ll be hard to make those visits."
She said she was thankful her mother already had a place in a Dunedin dementia ward, and felt for families who now had to factor distance into an already hard situation.
Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora Southern group director of operations Craig Ashton said HNZ was aware of the current pressure on dementia-level care beds in the South.
"At times, when all local dementia-level beds are occupied, we may need to place clients temporarily in facilities outside the district to ensure they receive the appropriate level of care without delay.
"We know this can be challenging for whānau, and we are actively working to minimise the need for out-of-district placements."
He said HNZ teams were "closely monitoring" capacity-supporting providers to maximise available beds, and progressing longer-term planning to increase dementia-level care capacity.
New Zealand Aged Care Association Otago board representative Malcolm Hendry said earlier this week dementia care homes in Dunedin had been asked by HNZ to start reassessing patients into different levels to free up D4 beds.
"Beds are very tight at the D4 level — so basically ... if you’ve got empty hospital-level beds and you’ve got residents who are on the cusp of being considered for hospital-level care, it may be worth arranging a reassessment to see whether they now fit that need," Mr Hendry said.
He said if that method did not free up enough beds, sending patients out of town was the next, and often only, option.
"Typically, it’s a one-way journey with dementia."
Mr Hendry said in the past demand for D4 beds would rise and fall.
However, that was happening much less now.
"There is a significant growth in people over 65, and that will mean that there will be significantly higher demand across the board for aged care, and dementia is obviously part of it."
Once people were assessed at D4 level — which meant they needed to be in a secure unit as opposed to a rest-home — often the only way to free up beds was moving them to hospital-level care or up to a D6 level.
"However, there were also very few D6-level facilities in Dunedin," Mr Hendry said.
D6 was a higher level of dementia care for people who were displaying "physical or verbal abuse-type symptoms".
"It’s part of the progression of some people’s dementia journey is that as their decline ... increases they can become more difficult to manage — they can be aggressive with staff, and they need a much higher staffing ratio."
He said it took five years to build an aged-care facility, and multiple governments had not put in the funding to encourage growth in the sector, causing the number of beds available to stagnate.
"This is part of a wider problem that we have been signalling for over a decade now ... we knew that this population growth was coming and we knew that it would put demand on the likes of dementia care particularly.
"As the population continues to increase, it’s highly likely that across the country there is going to be increased pressure on aged-care beds."
Taieri MP and Labour spokeswoman for seniors Ingrid Leary said she was "distressed" to hear people were being sent far away to receive care, and it highlighted the need for the new Dunedin hospital to have the 24 psychogeriatric beds as previously promised.
"National has reduced these to 12 — Labour [also] planned for strengthened community-based mental health services so that older people could be supported closer to home, but National has not delivered these services."
