In an era marked by advancing technology and shifting societal dynamics, one aspect remains unchanged: the desire of older Australians to age gracefully within their communities and cherished homes. With each passing year, more and more seniors express their unwavering commitment to maintaining a sense of independence, familiarity, and connection to the places they have called home for decades.
Home Care Packages provide people with Commonwealth-subsidised aged care services and support to enable them to remain at home for as long as possible. Such services or support might include domestic assistance, personal care, social support, transport and clinical care that cannot be sourced from other programs, State or Federal.
Over the past couple of years, previous Federal Budgets have committed to increased funding to create more Home Care Packages. An additional 80,000 Home Care Packages were created from the 2022-2023 Federal Budget. By 30 June 2023, 275,600 Home Care Packages will be available to people approved for this program. The Federal Budget 2023 has committed $166.8 million to provide an additional 9,500 Home Care Packages, which will be released over the 2023-2024 period.
This news is welcomed within the sector as it allows people who are unable to receive support from the entry-level program, the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP), to have a better chance at moving to the next level of the program and being approved for and assigned a package which can be used to meet their unmet goals, allowing them support to remain at home.
Across the country, there is a critical shortage of staff at the entry-level, and what this means for service provision is that people may be approved for CHSP services but may not receive them because the provider doesn’t have the staff to deliver the service.
If this sounds like your situation, don’t lose hope. If there is no service provision at the entry-level, you are within your rights to ask to be referred to the next level and have an assessment by the Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT), which is the workforce that approves people for Home Care Packages.
In rural and remote locations, entry-level services often don’t exist, so moving to the next level and being assessed by an ACAT is often the only way people in these geographically disadvantaged areas can get the support they need. With the allocation of these additional Home Care Packages, it is also anticipated that the wait times for people who have been approved but are waiting for their package to be assigned, to decrease. With those 80,000 packages allocated over the past two years, we’ve seen wait times decrease from 12-18 months to 3-6 months for medium-priority approval and from 6-9 months to 1-3 months for high-priority approval.
Written by Coral Wilkinson, a Registered Nurse with more than 30 years of experience in health and aged care.
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