The Federal Government was unaware that Level 4 Home Care Package (HCP) recipients were receiving 50% less care hours than they were 10 years ago, a Retirement Living Council panel session has revealed.
In the session – filmed on Thursday 15 October 2020 – StewartBrown Senior Partner Grant Corderoy provided a financial update on the performance of the home care sector, including the drop in the average weekly care hours of all package levels to 5.36 hours – a fall of 30 minutes in the last 12 months.
At the same time, the average amount of unspent funds per clients continues to rise to $8,841 – or around $1.1 billion in total.
Government doesn’t understand how home care packages work
StewartBrown had completed an extensive survey for the Department asking home care providers about their services, costs, demographics, staffing, and how much clients spent on capital purchases which had highlighted the numbers above (which we reported on here) – and “shocked” the bureaucrats, Grant says.
“They didn’t expect to see that response,” he stated, despite StewartBrown’s work highlighting the issue of unspent funds for a number of years.
Grant said the Department still has a lot of work to do to understand how Home Care Packages (HCPs) work.
“The appetite is there but the understanding is not there at this stage,” he said.
Demand needs to be understood to change system
The Senior Partner argued that the Government needs to have a better understanding of which people assessed for home care and sitting on the home care wait list have a need for care services today.
Grant says the Department could then make changes to address those needs, including potentially shifting the system to up to eight levels of funding.
Either way, the message is clear: The Government really has little understanding of the home care sector or the demand for services – despite holding responsibility for the sector.
Will we see changes to force the Department to be accountable – and collect the data required to meet demand – post-Royal Commission recommendations?
You can watch the full, 55-minute session here.
