It’s that time of year again. The 2022-23 Budget has been released. Here are the key issues affecting residential aged care providers.
Around $460 million over four years for residential aged care. This is in addition to the five-year investment of $7.8 billion announced last Budget.
With a $345.7 million investment, this is where almost all the Budget 2022-23 money is going. The plan is to embed pharmacists within aged care facilities to improve medication management. Details are scant at this stage, but it is likely that this will be a requirement and not merely an option for providers.
The Government will invest $48.5 million over two years to add 15,000 more training places for aged care courses. This reform is part of the JobTrainer Aged Care Boost and will be made available from January 2023. The places appear to be for aged care personal carers. The Government’s Budget Fact Sheet says that there will be “an additional 15,000 low fee and free training places”. It’s not clear how many of the 15,000 will be low fee and how many will be free. These training places are in addition to the 33,800 aged care training places announced in the 2021–22 Budget.
The purpose of the reform is to “provide a strong pipeline of entry-level aged care workers and enable existing aged care workers to upskill.”
The Government’s Budget Fact Sheet also details several other training and workforce reforms that may benefit the residential aged care industry, including funding for additional aged care clinical placements.
The Government will spend $22.1 million to deliver trials of Multidisciplinary Outreach Services. These services would provide links between hospitals, a range of medical and allied health specialists, and the aged care facility to provide more comprehensive care to residents while sharing the cost with the states and territories. The trials are being run to test the long-term feasibility of the Multidisciplinary Outreach Services.
The Budget provides the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission with an additional $21.6 million to be used to undertake 1,443 residential aged care quality audits in 2022–23.
The new Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) funding model for residential aged care is scheduled to begin from 1 October 2022. The AN-ACC will replace the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI). The Budget allocates $20.1 million to provide a “smooth transition” from the ACFI to the AN-ACC, and to “ensure no facility receives less funding in the first two years of the new funding model compared with their current funding.”
The Department of Health has already been using regionally-focused teams across eight Primary Health Network (PHN) regions to engage with local aged care providers and support implementation of the aged care reforms at a local level. The Budget providers $6.1 million over six months to continue this program.
The main criticism among commentators is that the Budget does not provide a wage increase for aged care workers.