The hard truths of aged care cannot be avoided, and it’s time the government stopped trying.
The federal government’s official aged care Wait Times Report measures the people who’ve stopped waiting. The 106,977 still in the queue don’t count.
Mollie, 97, is one of them. She has fallen four times this year and once lay on the kitchen floor for 20 hours until a neighbour found her. Her GP flagged her as a priority.
It still took six months, and weeks in a Melbourne hospital, to get her an aged care assessment. In the meantime her daughters did the work the system was supposed to do.
Support at Home was meant to be the reform for people like Mollie. It was built to help older Australians live at home, safely, for longer. One year in, it’s managing demand with delay, and the ageing wave has barely started.
It was in trouble from the start
Two months in, 23,491 applications were waiting just to be triaged. Requests for internal review of assessments jumped from 188 in the four months before launch to 915 in the first five months after it.
On 31 October, FACES (Families for Aged Care Equity and Support) released a report card on the Support At Home program’s first year. We graded six areas on the government’s own published figures, using a published method. The overall grade is a D. No area scored above a C.
You can read HSD’s report on the FACES analysis, and others, here.
Some things improved
The median wait from applying through My Aged Care to ongoing services starting fell by 47 days, from 344 to 297.
The median on the end-of-life pathway is 14 days. Personal care has been fully funded since 1 October.
The triage backlog fell by almost 40%.
But demand swallowed the gains
The wait fell by 14% per cent. The number of people in the queue rose by 34%, to 325,045 at some point in 2025-26.
The system is running faster on a treadmill that keeps speeding up. Even the Department concedes it.
“Demand for aged care services has increased significantly,” its latest demographics report says, despite 83,000 additional places released last year.
This year, new places fall to 32,000. For someone approved at standard priority in June, the Department’s own estimate is seven to eight months to funding.
The Royal Commission said one month. The government accepted that in principle in 2021.
The safety grade is an F
In 2025-26, 6436 people died in the queue for home care funding they had been assessed and approved for, up from 4812 the year before.
That’s 17 a day, nearly five times the national road toll.
Nobody waits well in their eighties or nineties. Without the care they need, people fall and end up in hospital.
An emergency department is the most expensive waiting room in the country.
Hospitals are picking up what home care can’t
More than 3600 older patients are stranded in hospital waiting for aged care, up from 2700 a year earlier.
And residential care is no easy alternative. National occupancy is above 93%. In 2024-25, the sector added just 578 net new places, against projected demand growth of more than 9000 residents.
Emergency doctors are now calling for a maximum wait for every priority level, so no one waits beyond a set limit. FACES supports this.
Then there’s the money
As Health Services Daily reported last week, the Department told Senate estimates that $727 million in Support at Home funding went unspent between November and June.
At the Level 5 budget, that’s a year of care for nearly 18,000 people, about one in six of those waiting.
Officials said minimum service offers, which start people on 60% of their approved funding, were likely a contributing factor. They couldn’t say how much.
The acting inspector-general of aged care, Kate Pope, said people on part funding are wary of spending it because they don’t know when the rest will come.
The front door has problems too
The Commonwealth Ombudsman found the integrated assessment tool was introduced “without any meaningful risk assessment, evaluation or analysis”, and that a reasonable person would lack confidence the system is fair and consistent.
The Department noted the recommendation to let assessors override the tool.
A case review option starts in January, and an independent review of the tool reports in the first half of 2027. That’s cold comfort for families stuck with the wrong assessment now.
Related
Then there’s the counting, which is where it gets creative
Section 342A of the Aged Care Act 2024, added through an amendment from independent senator David Pocock, requires a quarterly Wait Times Report. It was a win for transparency.
But the report measures waits only for people whose services have started. The 106,977 people waiting for funding at 30 June aren’t in it. Neither are the people who died waiting.
And under the program’s own counting rules, people on interim funding are “classified as having received their approved place” and leave the waiting list.
The official report measures the wait of people who have stopped waiting.
Families fill the gap
YouGov research for Vera found 2.43 million Australians aged 35 to 70 help a parent at least weekly, and more than half of those in work have used their own leave to do it.
Aged care reporting doesn’t count them.
The number of Australians aged 85 and over is projected to more than triple in 40 years, while the share of us in work falls. That makes this a productivity problem as well as a care one.
There’s no simple fix, and I’m not confident the government can move fast enough, or far enough, for what’s coming.
But it can start with the cheapest reform on the table.
Almost 4000 families have now joined FACES to call for one honest count, every quarter. Amend s342A so the quarterly report includes everyone waiting for funding, everyone who dies waiting, and the families providing care in the meantime.
You can’t fix what you refuse to count.
Then cap the wait, with a maximum for every priority level. And plan places on assessed need, not on what the budget allows. The Royal Commission recommended that too, and the government accepted it five years ago.
Count everyone. Cap the wait. Plan on need, not on budget.
If 17 people a day were dying on our roads, there’d be an emergency summit by Friday. In aged care, they don’t even make the Wait Times Report.
Melissa Reader is the convenor of FACES (Families for Aged Care Equity and Support) and CEO of Vera, which helps families work out how to care for an ageing parent. She founded Violet, a national not-for-profit for the last chapters of life which has now supported over 50,000 families. She is a Westpac Social Change Fellow, an alumna of Harvard Kennedy School and INSEAD, and commissioning editor of Club Sandwich, a podcast about caring for ageing parents in midlife. Vera commissioned Stand Up and Be Counted, the YouGov research cited here. The full report card and sources are at faces.org.au.