Over the weekend I was trawling through the slide deck of the Department of Health and Aged Care webinar in December 2023 discussing the future direction of Home Care and Support at Home.
Hidden on about slide 46 was the clipping above which clearly identifies the option of pooling individual resident home care package funding in a retirement village to fund a village nurse for the benefit of all.
The full slide is below. You can see that incorporating this smaller section was not a throwaway graphic. It was well planned out and executed, with an implementation date of July 25
Combined with the villages being identified for the first time in drafting of the new Aged Care Act as a place where seniors can receive care support, one can see the pieces falling into place.
This is a game changer for residential aged care operators who have been strategizing a transfer of new investment into retirement villages rather than new aged care beds.
Their skills and mission can be serviced in the regulation and red tape light village sector which is profitable, rather than the loss making and highly regulated residential care sector.
In the Retirement Living Council’s Shared Care White Paper released in December, it sought Block Funding to underwrite ageing support services:
The sector may be closer to achieving new funding methods than it thinks.
One casualty however will be the positioning that retirement villages are to provide ‘independent living’. When a village is being marketed, and one of the main features is that a village nurse is available, funded by the residents, it will be hard to say it is ‘independent living’.
A number of predominantly private operators will not be happy with this as it reduces their sales sizzle.
