CallMeAl
A lot of the care provided in nursing home facilities is for management of ongoing health issues, as far as I am aware this is even more true for high-care patients.
Providing pureed food for people unable to chew, thickened fluids to people who can easily choke on plain water and care for people managing things like colostomy bags and incontinence are all medical necessities. Whether this care is provided specifically by the aged care worker or not is mostly irrelevant, the person is extremely unwell and requires full-time medical care, this makes the environment the equivalent to a hospital setting in my view and so additional requirements are probably justified.
Many, many people work closely with children with no requirements like this. I understand the point you are making about primary school teachers and the level of contact with children but the flip side is that a music teacher may interact with 300 students in a week, where most child care workers would have a group many times smaller. Every one of those 300 students has a family including, no doubt, many kinder classes worth of babies and toddlers. I can’t see any worthwhile distinction between the two except that public school teachers are employed by the state government and have a powerful union and childcare workers do not.
I think if this woman had been hired recently I would be less concerned but she had been in a senior role for 10+ years with the company before this became an issue. Allowing private companies to lay off long term staff when the actual risk their decision poses is negligible seems like a serious erosion of workers rights to me. A childcare centre is not a sterile environment after all, the kids aren’t required to have flu shots and are far more likely to spread germs and illness amongst each other than the staff in the normal course of events.
