Rising demand by older Australians seeking care in their homes

Older Australians increasingly want to receive aged care and live independently in their own homes for longer.

In the past decade demand for Commonwealth-funded home care packages has risen, with more than 216,000 Australians now accessing the program.

An extra 9500 Home Care Packages announced recently in the Federal Budget has been welcomed. But Director of the National Centre for Healthy Ageing (NCHA) Professor Velandai Srikanth told ABC Breakfast TV's Fauziah Ibrahim that more work needs to be done to address future demand for people to stay at home and thrive.

“I think the step towards increasing Home Support Packages is a good one. But there is a lot of work that needs to be done to try and gear up to provide the kind of care that's going to be required. If people want to stay at home for as long as possible and thrive at home their health care needs to be considered,” Professor Srikanth said.

"The Royal Commission has reported to us that 80 per cent of Australians want to be at home as they get older and thrive at home as successfully as they can, for as long as possible. The Baby Boomers clearly are going to want to stay at home as they get to the point of requiring more care.”

Click on the video below to watch the entire interview.

Reproduced with the permission of ABC Weekend Breakfast.

A new Aged Care Taskforce will also review aged care funding arrangements and develop options to make the system fair and equitable for all Australians.

Professor Srikanth told ABC Weekend Breakfast that the aged care industry has been under the pump for a while and the pandemic really created problems for them.

“What they are really struggling with is how to provide that complex care that people are requiring when they arrive at residential aged care so no longer is it just providing care or personal care. People arriving at residential aged care have very complex and significant health needs,” Professor Srikanth said.

“It's up to us as research organisations and other bodies to work with them (the aged care workforce) to try and develop new ways to help them care for it. For example, what we're looking at the NCHA is how do you establish nurse practitioners as hubs to link in with such residential facilities and then try and integrate them with healthcare as best as possible.”

Find out more about how the NCHA is linking translation research to tackle major challenges in healthy ageing at www.ncha.org.au.

Working with key partners across Monash University, Peninsula Health and other organisations, the goal of the NCHA is to deliver national solutions for major challenges in healthy ageing through excellence in translational research.

*Thankyou to the ABC Weekend Breakfast team for permission to republish this video.