Older Australians and advocates concerns regarding the implementation of Home Care program changes have been confirmed by Government data released earlier this week. LiveWell Care recently raised its concerns regarding consumer activation rates in its recent submission to the federal governments discussion paper Future Reform- an integrated care at home program to support older Australians. A key issue raised was perceived low consumer activation rates of home care packages and a lack of support for consumers to activate packages assigned to them.

On 15 September 2017 the Department of Health publicly released the first Home Care Packages (HCP) Program Data Report.  The below is a summary of key data trends in the transition to the new home care arrangements over the period 27 February 2017 to 30 June 2017.

Key findings are:

• There were 38,000 completed home care approvals during the period
• 71% of the new packages went to new clients receiving care for the first time
• 29% were upgrades to existing clients.

The number of consumers receiving home care increased by 10.2% (between 30 June 2016 to 31 March 2017) which reflects the growth in the home care market. The number of approved providers with a home care service increased by almost 50% (between June 2016 and June 2017).

The Home Care Packages Program Data Report also indicates that 20 percent of assigned HCPs were not activated during the first four months of  implementation. This being consistent with LiveWell Care’s anecdotal evidence.

The Report does not include information about the time it takes for consumers to activate their package or the number of consumers who have changed providers.

Another key problem is unmet demand for packages. The data report shows consumers in the queue for home care packages in two categories. As at 30 June 2017:

• 35,154 people had been assigned an interim (lower) level package while awaiting the approved level package
• 53,750 were waiting in the queue without being assigned interim support.

This is an overall queue of 88,904 up from 80,996 on 27 February 2017.

Due to the high demand for packages, the Federal Government said most consumers could expect a maximum wait time of “more than 12 months”.While the Government has just announced that it will convert lower level packages (level 1 and 2) into 6,000 higher level packages (level 3 and 4), this will not meet demand.

It will double the planned growth in level 3 and 4 packages in 2017-18, but there is a shortfall of more than 80,000 packages.

It should be noted that some people are receiving interim support via the Commonwealth Home Support Program (CHSP) in lieu of receiving a HCP even though they have been approved for one. This represents an unmet demand and it is not clear if this is accounted for in the HCP data report.