Home Care Headwinds
4 minute read
I was a CEO of a large aged care provider at the start of this century when it all went sideways - as it so often does for CEO’s. And as CEO’s so often do in this situation, I chose moving to consulting as my parachute and spending more time with family as my reason for leaving the role. Buy me a couple of drinks sometime and I will tell you the whole story.
The area I chose for my move to consulting was the World Health Organisation’s Age Friendly Cities movement. I went on to spend 7 years working with local communities finding ways to support people to remain in their homes as they grow older. We consulted with a huge number of older people who told us what they wanted, from improving community infrastructure and transport to better in home support.
I loved this work, it felt like it was the beginning of something really important that had legs. It is a win-win approach, older people want to stay at home and the government wants that same outcome (it saves money compared to funding residential aged care). I was part of something that was big and was going to just keep getting bigger.
I reluctantly left the ‘Age Friendly’ space when I got a consulting role in the design days of the NDIS. The work just kept expanding and I never got the time to return to aged care until late last year, more than a decade since I left.
Now that I am back, the thing I notice most is the lack of progress made by successive governments on implementing what everyone wants and needs, better care at home. I am still wondering: why the failure to deliver the obvious? Why hasn’t home care got the attention it deserves?
Are all the delays possibly caused by the headwinds/tailwinds effect, better known to psychologists as negativity bias? The bias describes ‘our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events’. We notice the headwinds much more than the tailwinds, like when you’re riding your bike. You constantly think to yourself, I can’t wait for this wind to be at my back. Then as soon as it is, you don’t notice the wind is now assisting you.
The negative issues that dominate the government’s attention in aged care are much more readily found in residential care. From Covid deaths to abuse and neglect it is often difficult to get the government or media (or the Boards of aged care organisations) to focus on much else. I am sure many members of the public have no idea the home care sector even exists.
It could just be that negativity bias is the reason why home care is the poor cousin in aged care public policy and program development.
Remember when the Labor Government promised that adequate funding for a new Support at Home program would be their 'number one priority' response to the Aged Care Royal Commission? That was over 3 years ago. So far, the outcome of being top of the reform priorities has been delay after delay and a strong sense of disappointment.
I am not one of the people who welcomes the announcement of delays to implementing the home care reforms. The delays to improving the structure of the home care program now date all the way back to 2017. They are an indication of a monumental governmental failure to prioritise and plan, and now it’s getting embarrassing. I have never heard a government announce that a program (CHSP) will be transitioned no earlier than July 2027. No earlier? Seriously?
To add insult to injury, the latest Federal Budget included decisions to only allocate half the number of new home care packages recommended by the government’s own Taskforce and to reallocate unspent CHSP funds to ‘other aged care programs’. The government is not afraid of showing no real rush to do anything much in home care.
Come to think of it, the government is yet to respond at all to the Taskforce report delivered last December.
So how can we address the negativity bias in aged care and get the government’s attention on prioritising the development of the home care system everyone wants?
Coming back from spending the last decade in the very vocal disability sector, the answer seems obvious to me. We need to get our advocacy much louder about the need for better home care and we need to stop being so compliant with the government when they disappoint us. We need to increase the negativity the government feels from the home care sector when they fail to do what is needed. It’s way over time that we got more demanding.
What do we want?
Much better home care!
When do we want it?
Now!
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