The past five years have seen more than 50,000 Australian seniors die while still on the waiting list for a Home Care Package, according to government data.
The past five years have seen more than 50,000 Australian seniors die while still on the waiting list for a Home Care Package, according to government data.
While average wait times for the highest level of HCP funding dropped from 12 months or more in 2020 to six to nine months in 2021, more than 8,000 on the National Priority System (NPS) waiting list for home care died in the 2020-21 financial year and 3,802 in the latter half of 2021, as reported in The Guardian.
Shadow Health Minister Mark Butler (pictured) slammed the figures as a “national disgrace”.
“Most Australians want to age in their own home but the system that’s supposed to help them do that is in crisis.
“There are still tens of thousands of older Australians waiting for Home Care Packages. 50,000 have died waiting since July 2017,” he said.
A spokesperson for Senator Richard Colbeck, Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services, told The Guardian that it was misleading to say the deaths resulted from the wait for a package.
“As Department of Health secretary Prof Brendan Murphy noted during Senate estimates, the number of people over the age of 75 who have died while on the waiting list for a home care package is exactly the same proportion of people who have died in that aged bracket in the general community,” they said.
StewartBrown’s December 2021 Aged Care Financial Performance Survey found that the amount of unspent funds in Home Care Packages nationwide could exceed $1.7 billion.
