Government’s Support at Home waitlist pledge questioned

A new report entitled Life on the Wait List has been released by Anglicare Australia, shining a spotlight on the amount of time older Australians are left waiting for care at home without support.

The report states that the wait time for older people is estimated to be over 15 months with 68,000 in limbo, a figure that has doubled over one year.  

Benetas CEO Sandra Hills OAM, said that as an aged care provider with a “very broad range” of services, they see “firsthand” the challenges experienced by older Victorians.

“Ensuring that older people are able to access the right level of care, in the right settings, at the right time can only occur if we are providing timely support to them when they reach out for assistance,” said Ms Hills.

“Against a backdrop of surging demand for accessing care at home, government delays have meant that older Australians who desperately need services are experiencing unreasonable delays to access the care they deserve.”

COTA Australia says that the Federal Government’s predictions of nine to 12 months are inaccurate and misleading as a COTA analysis of a recent UTS Ageing Research Collaborative found only one-in-three home support providers have availability for new clients meaning the ‘hidden’ delays have not been included in the government’s estimates or published by them.

Acting CEO of COTA Australia Corey Irlam says that while the new Support at Home scheme will be revolutionary, we need to make sure its benchmarks are created from real data and that success is the main aim.

“When the Federal Government released its Aged Care Act legislation last week, it announced that by 1 July 2027 people will have to wait no more than three months for support at home, however we now know that the government’s wait time estimates don’t show the full picture, which is very concerning,” Mr Irlam said.   

“The figures the Federal Government is using are misleading at best. They don’t include the full waiting period from application to service commencement – only the middle waiting period from the time assessment is completed until a place is allocated to an individual.”

Adding, “We’re talking about older people waiting for services, they need to be able to live their life with dignity and in the way they want to. We can’t have a situation where the government is trying to fudge the figures on how long people are having to wait for the support they need.”

Ms Hills said that the report articulates the “unintended consequences” for older Australians of not receiving access to care.

“To ensure the sector is ready to meet the demand – especially given the significant changes set to occur when the new Aged Care Act is implemented – we must ensure that we have greater transparency regarding the composition of the Government’s current wait list,” said Ms Hills.  

“We’re calling on the Government to release enough Home Care Packages to clear the wait list in its next mid-year Budget update, so that the new Aged Care Act can be set up for success. Older Australians expect and deserve a system that has the capability to support their needs and allows them to access care when they need it.”

The report highlights the wait times in accessing home care mean that older Australians are being funneled into residential aged care and hospitals as their health declines.

Mr Irlam said that the “misleading” waiting period between assessment and place allocation shouldn’t be the focus and instead the Government need to “ensure” its three-month wait time benchmark is achieved on the “definition of from application” until service commencement.

“Not only will we be pushing the government to ensure it’s not fudging the figures on how long people are actually waiting for care, but we’ll also be calling on the Parliament to ensure the new Aged Care Act has a legal requirement for Government to publish a full waitlist report making the entire waiting journey transparent from application until your aged care services commence,” said Mr Irlam.

“We’re not talking about a difference of a week here and there – we’re talking about many, many months of an older person’s life. With reports of around 10,000 people dying a year on the waitlist, sadly that’s often time people don’t have.”

The Anglicare report found that of the aged care providers across the country that they surveyed, none can meet demand within their own communities due to funding constraints.

Despite Anglicare supporting the current aged care reforms that are presently underway, they call on the Government to “fund the release of the necessary amount of Home Care Packages” in order to take away the waitlist prior to the commencement of Support at Home to stop the new system from being “set up for failure” by “inheriting a waiting list that the new injection of funds” will not be able to clear.

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