This week marked six months since the Aged Care Taskforce’s Final Report with its 23 recommendations was presented to the Federal Government, and aged care providers are quite rightly asking: where is the Government’s response to the recommendations?
The Minister’s Department had advised the sector that the Report would be made public no later than the end of January. Instead, the Report ended up being released on 11 March, three months ago this week.
Despite six months of active engagement by the Minister as Chair of the Taskforce last year, and another six since the Report was completed, there has been no hint of which recommendations, if any, will be taken up by Government.
The sector had expected that the recommendations would be announced and incorporated in this year’s Budget and Forward Estimates as well as the draft of the new Aged Care Act.
But despite the Government acknowledging the need to deliver a sustainably funded aged care sector, operators are still waiting.
As we recently reported in SATURDAY, this is having a huge impact on the ability of operators to strategically plan for the future – and access the funding that could potentially flow from the introduction of consumer contributions.
“We are in practice not planning, but working from month to month, which is not the way to run a multi-million-dollar business,” said Alasdair Croydon, CEO of Sydney-based standalone provider Holy Family Services.
Aged care missing out on $8.9 million a day
This week, DCM Group CEO Chris Baynes was featured in an article in The Australian discussing the delay.
He noted that based on StewartBrown’s calculations that the Taskforce recommendations would generate an additional $3.265 billion in cash for operators (taking three years to achieve this level), that equates to $8.9 million a day that is not flowing into aged care, $6.3 million for residential aged care and $2.6 million for home care.
“Each day the recommendations are delayed means 13 new beds ($6.3 million at $500,000 a bed) and 90 Home Care Packages ($2.6 million at $29,000 per average Package) are not being created,” Chris stated.
At the same time virtually no new beds are being built because residential aged care operators are losing money on a daily basis – see the figures below from Senate Estimates.
Just this week, I spoke with two CEOs, one private and the other Not For Profit. The NFP has zero aged care beds in their development pipeline – the private operator is weighing up reducing their investment in new beds.
The Government went to the last election with aged care as one of the pillars of its platform. Two years on, what will voters remember at the polls: a Government that supported the country’s sporting goals or the one that fixed a broken aged care system?
If the Government wants quality aged care, they need to act now on their own Taskforce Report and its recommendations.
