AHPA presented a submission to the Department on the exposure draft of “A New Aged Care Act” (Consultation paper No.2). This is our third submission to the department on the proposed new Act.
We reiterate in our submission the parlous state of allied health in Australia’s aged care sector and the continued decline in the number of minutes of allied health care in residential aged care to just over 4 minutes per resident per day.
Our submission repeated the core themes of our previous submissions that ensuring the provision of allied health services to all older people who need them requires the aged care system to address several interrelated issues. These are:
- a lack of any meaningful, mandatory service provision benchmark;
- the current flawed approach to allied health needs assessment; and
- the failure of the present aged care system to incorporate a philosophy of reablement.
The submission makes 14 key recommendations to improve the Act.
Including:
- inserting reablement as an object or key function of the Act;
- embedding the concept of needs based care, including requiring the use of an evidence based assessment and care planning tool;
- expressly including the right to receive high quality care and the human right to a standard of food and nutrition that supports health, wellbeing and quality of life; and
- ensuring the rights included in the Act are legally enforceable and there is a positive duty of provider to respect these rights.
Read the recommendations and full AHPA Submission.