In 2017-18, 13,340 people have abandoned home-care shortlists for a residential home, a department report shows.
The department revealed that sufficient home-care packages could not cover thousands of older Australians who were forced to go to residential homes.
An extra $537 was promised by Scott Morrison to provide additional 10,000 home-care packages after an alerting report about the department in the royal commission interim report.
According to Morrison, it is the job of the government to ensure how older Australians facilitate their choices. The demands of their changing healthcare demands should be responded accordingly.
And this should not be seen as an institutional system that could be seen as an end in itself.
However, the additional funding could not cover up the waiting list of 120,000 people. The figure needs an estimated $2.5 billion to be properly handled.
Due to such a problem, older Australian are forced to leave the waitlist and take their chances on residential care. The department reported that 13,340 left the waitlist to go to a residential home.
In the previous Senate hearing, a questioning from Labor’s Murray Watt led the department to show that the figure already increased to 18,914.
Moreover, the department said that because people are approved both for home care and residential care, this does not necessitate that it would lead to residential care.
However, Julie Collins, the Shadow Aged Care minister, said that this is not the problem.
She said that the system is expected to give appropriate care for aged Australians but the failure attributed to the Liberals entail that a larger population of older Australians are forced to residential care rather than having the choice.
The minister also said that the government failed to comply with their promise because the figures have shown that older Australian are faced with very little choice.
5,500 packages were to be rolled out by December 1.
The additional funding was weighted for higher-level packages to try and address the number of people who are receiving less care within interim packages.
The head of the Aged Care Financing Authority told the senate last October that there is an increasing concern over the capacity of the aged sector to finance the department due to the exit of a large proportion of residential care providers due to losses.
