It’s time to stop treating the aged care waitlists as an unfortunate backlog and start recognising it as a systemic failure, writes Kasy Chambers. If aged care were truly seen as part of our health system, this would be considered a national scandal. We would never accept a health system that says, ‘Yes, you need surgery. Aged care sits awkwardly alongside health care, despite the fact that the two are deeply intertwined. And it means asking a simple question: if this were happening anywhere else in the health system, would we accept it?