Older Australians are being told they will have to wait up to nine months to be assessed for Government-funded aged care amid a litany of problems with the Single Assessment System (SAS), with some waiting for assessments that will never be delivered.
Founder and Director of See Me Aged Care Navigators, Coral Wilkinson, has told The Weekly SOURCE about several problems with the SAS that mean consumers "are not being delayed [for assessment], they are not being assessed at all".
Average wait is seven weeks
The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing''s SAS took effect on 1 January this year, replacing the established Regional Assessment Service, which assessed eligibility for the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP), Aged Care Assessment Teams (ACATs), and the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) workforces.
The aim of the SAS was to make it easier for older people to access Government-funded aged care services and to have their needs reassessed as required.
According to a spokesperson for the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, the national average wait time for an initial assessment across all priorities and assessment types, from referral to support plan completion, was 44.7 days over the three months from 1 March to 31 May 2025.
For the same period, the average wait time for a reassessment (which make up 65% of all assessments) across all priorities and assessment types, from referral to support plan completion, was 50 days.
Staff shortages
But Coral said consumers are being told they will have to wait up to nine months for an assessment, and some are not being given a timeframe at all.
From the start, organisations tendered by the Government to deliver SAS services weren't given "reasonable lead time" to advertise for staff to become new assessors. For some, it was as little as five weeks. Clinical staff have been most challenging to recruit and retain, and without those key staff some organisations simply have not been able to complete comprehensive assessments.
"People are not aware of this so they wait and wait for a comprehensive assessment that is not going to happen," Coral said.
Backlog of assessments
On top of the staffing challenges, the new assessment organisations "inherited" thousands of outstanding assessments.
"They have been trying to catch up since the SAS began," Coral said.
My Aged Care out of date
Compounding the problems has been the fact that the My Aged Care portal does not have up-to-date information about which organisations conduct assessments and is directing consumers to organisations that are not longer doing assessments.
The Department's 250-page My Aged Care Assessment Manual does contain a workaround but consumers aren't aware of the fix. Again, "people are unaware they can take this action," Coral added.
Organisations that previously operated under the ACAT system are triaging and assessing people "within appropriate time frames," she noted.
