How many older people miss out on aged care due to a scarcity of places? It’s the question that could frustrate the review of the Living Longer Living Better aged care reforms.
A lack of clear data on the amount of “unmet demand” for aged care services could hinder the review of the Living Longer Living Better reforms, as researchers and government agencies struggle to accurately quantify how many seniors miss out on care and services.
As Australian Ageing Agenda reports today, the Federal Government this week appointed a top bureaucrat to head the review, meaning it now gets underway (read that story here).
How well the LLLB reforms have addressed the issue of unmet demand is the first question the review must tackle, but a lack of clear data on the long-standing issue is yet again coming to the fore.
During a forum last month that canvassed issues facing the review, researchers and providers were cautioned against using the time lag between assessment for services and entry into aged care as crude measure of unmet demand.
Ian Appleby from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare said he had a “great deal of concern” with describing lapsed time from approval to admission as a measure of unmet need.
“There are a lot of other reasons why people don’t go from approval to admission, and there’s a great deal of work to be done to get closer to what really is unmet need,” he told the forum organised by the Australian Association of Gerontology.
Richard Cumpston, director of Australian Projections, illustrated the “great difficulty in providing aged care to all Australians regardless of geographic location” by overlaying population statistics on the department’s aged care planning regions.
Aged care recipients who did not have the financial means to pay large bonds upfront may be less attractive to providers and therefore struggled to find permanent residential care, he said.
“They may have repeated stays in respite care, or inadequate home care. If so, they will disappear from the present aged care statistical system; it’s one of the big holes in the data that needs to be fixed,” said Dr Cumpston.
Continuing unmet demand may gradually push up bond sizes as providers came to realise they were “on a gravy train,” he said.
The department needed good data to detail which seniors were missing out on aged care, particularly in light of the government’s obligation to provide care to all who needed it regardless of race, culture, economic circumstance or geographic location, he said.
“Regulators have to ensure providers receive the best possible measures of unmet demand in each area where they are considering investing in service provision.
“If we’re expecting aged care organisations to provide the fabric of aged care right across Australia then [regulators] need to very carefully measure where it’s failing and very carefully provide subsidies,” said Mr Cumpston.
Ian Yates, chief executive of the Council on the Ageing (COTA) Australia, told the forum that the real issues of unmet demand likely lay in home care and the unequal distribution of the current levels of home care packages.
“That affects the demand on residential care so that there are still too many people who go into residential care because they can’t get a Level 3 or 4 package,” he told the forum.
Want to have your say on this story? Comment below. Send us your news and tip-offs to editorial@australianageingagenda.com.au
the problem i see is that there are people in aged care now that dont need to be. they could be at home if home care services were available
Dianne I agree with you. And Home Care Services need a good shake up ie I’m not too sure that they are being managed or coordinated by people qualified to evaluate clients’ actual needs – over and above simply reading their ACAT.
Residential aged care occupancy rates are 92.5%, down from 96.1% a decade ago.
Part of this decline in occupancy is from providers changing multi-occupancy rooms to single-occupancy rooms because the consumer will not accept two or more-bed rooms. This is often done without advising DoH of the change because it may only be temporary and the providers want to keep all their approved places “on line”, even if not currently offered to residents.
Another part of the reason for falling occupancy is because we have enough places in many of our markets and the numbers of new places we are building are adequate to meet growth in demand.
Length of time between getting assessed and actually using aged care services is not a strong measure of lack of availability of aged care services. Many persons assessed for eligibility to access residential aged care funding elect to avoid or delay admission by seeking to utilise our ever-better home care services – funded and private – particularly those offered within congregated aged living environments, including retirement villages, pensioner rental apartments and land-lease communities.