Home care sector in purgatory, says consultant Jason Howie

Home care providers are in a state of limbo, delegates have been told at an industry event in Sydney.

Speaking at last week’s Aged and Community Care Providers Association’s state conference for New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Jason Howie – partner at aged care consultancy Pride Living – told delegates: “We seem to be in a holding pattern with the reform program at the moment. Those deadlines that we were expecting to see over the course of the next 12 months and two years have been kicked down the road a little bit.”

As Mr Howie noted, the planned consolidation of the home care program has faced delay after delay. “I remember it was first promised to happen in 2018. So it’s been a very long journey. There has been a lot of lost opportunity for the aged care sector in that time,” he said.

Mr Howie told delegates there is an “absence of information” about what the Support at Home model is going to ultimately look like. This void, he said, “makes decision making really difficult, it makes strategic planning really difficult, and it makes investment in the sector really difficult … It’s having an impact in a whole range of different ways.”

Mr Howie then went on tell the room of home care providers what steps they can take while waiting for information from government. “There is a lot we can be doing,” he said.

And providers need to be acting now because the industry will grow significantly once the reforms are up and running. Already, the sector “is expanding quite rapidly”, said Mr Howie.

If providers want to stand out and achieve success they’ll need to implement “good, efficient business operations” and adopt “a really strong approach” to clinical care compliance. Both areas will, said Mr Howie, “stand you in really good stead and are the foundations of every business in this sector.”

“The better you perform in those areas the stronger the result and the more flexibility you’ll have moving into the new reform program,” he added.

Regarding compliance, Mr Howie said, if providers failed to adopt a good compliance culture in their organisation they would be behind the ball. “If you can’t do that, you just haven’t got a ticket to the game.”

Key to any success, delegates were told, is growth. And key to growth is marketing. A way for small providers to stand out in the market is to focus on a particular niche demographic, said Mr Howie, “whether it be a particular ethnic group, a particular clinical need, a particular service environment. There are a lot of different niches you can operate in and become more and more profitable over a period of time.”

Another way for smaller operators to attract new clients is for organisations to become better at what they do and to become better known for what it is that they do. “You can be delivering better services to clients without necessarily needing to get bigger,” said Mr Howie.

Whatever services their organisations are going to be delivering, Mr Howie told delegates that – in an ever-crowded marketplace – they can’t be shy about spruiking their wares. “You’re still going to have to go out there and market your services,” he said. “You’re going to have to find a way to communicate and cut through the noise to find new clients to bring into your organisation.”

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