In a submission to the Independent Health and Aged Care Pricing Authority (IHACPA) on the Pricing Framework for Australian Residential Aged Care Services 2024–25, AHPA’s submission focused on the allied health-related issues that we consider should be addressed and included in the Pricing Framework.
We advised that the current allied health service provision in residential aged care is in a parlous state. This is fundamentally at odds with the ethos that funding should remain closely aligned to the care that is required and provided and that the concept of closely aligning funding in this manner is premised on the assumption that ‘care required’ is ‘care provided’. Yet we argue that currently, costing and pricing only address the substandard level of allied health care currently provided – not the allied health care people might be clinically assessed to need.
Our submission documents the relentless decline of allied health minutes of care per resident AHPA to less than 5 minutes of care per resident per day for all types of allied health care and therefore submits that it is incumbent upon IHACPA to alert Government that system improvements need to be made before IHACPA costing and pricing can fulfil the function desired by stakeholders. You can read our submission here: