industry & reform
a relationship with your aged care service provider and case
manager because of the high churn you have in the industry.
Secondly, the training and the skill set of aged care workers is
an issue – from the staff older people contact for their home care
package through to the person who does the gardening as part
of the service.
billing systems, and having more robust administrative systems.
Other recommendations are ensuring there’s some sort of
checking process that goes on so services aren’t double-dipped,
as well as improving the training of not only individual care
workers, but also case managers.
So, providing training for services, managing packages,
accounting and finance, so that people understand what they’re
dealing with as far as the finances go in a package, and ensuring
that some of these billing and administrative errors aren’t made.
I’m sure a lot of these errors are made without intent. For
example, on a public holiday the older person still gets invoiced
for a service even though it wasn’t provided. Now that’s a systems
issue that could be prevented. Hopefully, that would reduce costs,
so the older person would be better off and charged less.
Presumably the administrative charges reflect what it takes to
administer a package, so we could reduce those costs by making
the administration more efficient and communicating it to the
older person.
A lot of time is taken up with the older person ringing up the
case manager or the provider and clarifying: “What’s this on the
statement? What’s that? Why haven’t I seen this person today? Why
am I getting different people every day?”
If we can remove those sorts of repetitive phone calls and
unnecessary communication, presumably it would be more cost
effective to administer the package. Which means there’s more
money in the hands of the older person to spend on their services.
Getting back to the fee structure that we’ve advocated in the
report, we’d like to see simplification of the fees and services, and
to have clarity about what people are actually paying for.
We also advocate for an independent third party, like an
ombudsman, that the older person can go to when they’re
having issues, rather than only being able to resolve these with
the provider.
In a competitive market, the fallback position is that if you
don’t like your provider, you can always change. But when you’ve
got an industry-wide issue, the report itself may bring about
some change. ■
In your report, did you find any positives that came out of
home care packages?
RW: Many people are very happy with the care they receive. I don’t
think I came across anybody who didn’t see having the package as
important. Many people felt they couldn’t live without one – it was
that important to them.
It’s important to them for a number of reasons. They want to
have physical and financial independence. They don’t want to rely
on their family for the help they need.
And the broader issue here is that people do have varying
needs. The physical needs tended to be similar in the sense that
they needed gardening, cleaning, help with food preparation
and so forth, and they exist to a greater or lesser extent. Then
some people focus more on social needs and activities that they
really value.
Overall, people were very grateful for the help that they did get.
One particular gentleman we spoke to said: “If you don’t have a
package, you’re history.”
On the other side, people said: “That’s great, I like the package,
it’s a fantastic system – however, it’s open to what you might call
abuse or rorting.” Some people thought it was a bit of a gravy train
and that it’s a source of income for providers, and they thought
the money could be spent in a much more efficient manner.
The next phase of the royal commission will look at home care
packages, and there could be restructuring on the cards. If the
government asked you how to improve home care packages,
what would you recommend?
RW: There are a number of recommendations in our report and
broad solutions in clarifying communications, statements and
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