Ageing Australia chief executive officer Tom Symondson has called for a quicker turnaround between the finalisation of the rules and publishing of the manual for the Support at Home program, which is due to start on 1 November with the new Aged Care Act.
A delay to the new Act is only useful if providers have more time to implement the changes properly, he said.
“We are saying to government, give us three months,” Mr Symondson told Australian Ageing Agenda on the sidelines of the peak body’s state conference in Sydney on Thursday. “Providers use that manual to define pretty much everything they do.”
The renewed calls for the prompt release of information follow news this week that the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing will release the final version of the manual in September, and come just over a week since the most recent update – version 3 – was published on 17 June and three months since the first version was released in March.
In response to an inquiry from AAA, a departmental spokesperson said: “With the Australian Government’s announcement that the start date of the new Aged Care Act 2024 will be briefly deferred, a final version of the program manual is now due to be released in September 2025.”
Mr Symondson said it was clear a delayed commencement to the new Act suited the government too, but he stressed that providers needed a minimum of three months between the final version of Support at Home program manual and the 1 November start date.
“I think it’s absolutely true to say that the government weren’t going to be ready for 1 July either. And so the delay to 1 November, yes it helps providers, but it actually helps the government more.”
But “we have said all along, ever since the delay was announced, get us everything you can as soon as you can in final form,” he told AAA.
“We think we need a bare minimum of 12 weeks with the final Support at Home Manual,” which means by 1 August, not 1 September, Mr Symondson said.
“And the concerning thing about this is, does it indicate other things will slip? We know we don’t get another delay. It’s 1 November or nothing. So why would we not see documents like that until it’s too late for us to implement them properly?
“And the drafts aren’t good enough because we know that changes are made between versions, but we don’t know what changes are going to be made,” Mr Symondson told AAA. “There have been so many revisions of the manual already and substantial changes have been made in each. So why would we not expect the same to happen with the final?”
Impacts on further delays for providers
As the manual defines what home care providers do, they need the final information to understand everything from reporting requirements to what they can and cannot provide to clients and training needs, Mr Symondson said.
“And even though we’ve got service lists and all the rest of it, the final detail for a frontline staff member is in that manual. So it’s much more important,” he told AAA. “And also it affects service agreements. So we need to have the final detail for those in order to communicate with the clients.”
If they don’t have the final rules and details, they can’t fully sign off on things or fully train staff, he said.
“You can train, but you’ll be training with partial information. And we would always say providers need to train as much as possible, as soon as possible. But they don’t want to do it twice,” Mr Symondson said.
“People are very worried about … losing goodwill in their workforce by constantly changing messages. And so that’s why it’s not helpful to give us these bits and pieces.”
Comment on the story below. Follow Australian Ageing Agenda on LinkedIn and Facebook, sign up to our twice-weekly newsletter and subscribe to AAA magazine for the complete aged care picture.
