Minister reiterates govt’s support to help older people age at home

The Albanese government has reiterated its commitment to enabling older Australians to age in their own homes, saying it is a cornerstone of its ambitious aged care reform agenda.

Minister for Aged Care and Seniors Sam Rae has highlighted the significant investment and policy changes to help make this happen, all of which he says benefits individuals, communities, and the efficiency of government services.

Speaking to 4CA Cairns host Murray Jones on Thursday, Minister Rae acknowledged the profound shift in societal expectations regarding aged care.

“A lot more people these days [...] want to be able to age at home for as long as possible,” he said.

“We want to set people up to get the care that they need as their needs evolve over time.”

This desire is not just a personal preference but is seen by the Labor government as a key public policy objective.

Minister Rae said that apart from keeping older people in their communities, aging in place has other benefits as well.

"It keeps people close to their communities, close to their loved ones, close to their support structures, allows them to stay in their own homes.”

“And it also is quite efficient from a government services perspective as well.”

To facilitate this, the government has substantially increased its investment in home support programs.

Minister Rae detailed the scale of this commitment, confirming that across the two major in-home support programs, the government in investing “about $14 billion every single year.”

The new Support at Home program, which started in November, has already seen record uptake.

“We've got about 350,000 people receiving Support at Home. That's more than double what it was five years ago, to give you an idea of that growth trajectory,” Minister Rae said.

The Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP) is also providing lower-level support to approximately 830,000 people across the country.

Minister Rae also pointed out that critical component of enabling effective home-based care is simplifying access to services, calling the transition to the new Single Assessment System a key reform.

He acknowledged that previously, there were “multiple assessment systems, different assessors, different processes.”

“Part of the reform that we've been going through is to try wherever possible to simplify the system so that older people and their supporters can navigate the system more easily.”

The Single Assessment System aims to ensure older people are assessed by qualified assessors, so that they're allocated access to the most appropriate services, whether that be CHSP, Support at Home, or residential aged care.

Minister Rae confirmed that median wait times for assessments have been driven down to around 24 days since the Single Assessment System was implemented.

Despite this, Minister Rae called the nation's ageing population “one of the public policy challenges of our time.”

“The aged care system, unfortunately, it is a complicated system,” he said.

“It's trying to meet the needs of many different people who want to achieve different things in that later period of their life. And we've always approached this with a principled position, that we want every Australian, no matter where they live, to be able to receive safe, dignified and high-quality aged care.”

“There's no silver bullet to these challenges. We can't fix everything overnight. We're heading in the right direction, but we're continuing to work with older people, with the sector and with the workforce to achieve those principles.”