Urgent action needed on home care for the aged

More than 100,000 are in the queue for vital services

The federal government’s own figures reveal there are now 101,508 older Australians in the queue for home-care packages that provide the vital daily support they need.

Critically, more than 60,000 have no package at all. A further 40,000 have a package at a lower level than they’ve been assessed as needing.

In summary, over 100,000 older Australians are going without any or enough physiotherapy, home help, support for personal care, transport or other support.

Some receive services through the Commonwealth Home Support Program, excluding others from those services, or through the health system at much higher cost. But many are being looked after by a partner, or family and friends. For those carers it can affect their ability to work, and create stress and anxiety. For older people it means they don’t receive the level of professional support they require.

That’s assuming they have family or friends to care for them. Some don’t and many don’t see family for months on end, and are too frail to leave their home without help.

The shortfall is worst for people requiring the highest levels of care at home – level 3 and level 4. Prioritising packages has partially addressed the problem in the short term but has temporarily reduced the total number of packages available. We need better than a short-term fix.

Home-care packages are the preferred alternative to nursing homes. Switching funds from residential to home care takes a few years to be budget neutral because residential funding has a four- or five-year lag time between allocation and expenditure, whereas home care has little lag.

The government will have to bite the bullet and put extra resources into home care or the queue will continue to grow.

In the medium term we need the government and Labor to demonstrate bipartisan support for reform, to switch funding from residential to home-care packages, to keep pace with need and drastically reduce waiting lists.

Ian Yates, chief executive, Council on the Ageing (COTA) Australia