The Single Assessment System has delivered nothing but a location lottery, blown-out waitlists and denials from Canberra that defy reality.
Launched in December last year, the new Single Assessment System promised to simplify and improve aged care assessments.
“The new system makes it easier for older people to access government-funded aged care services as their needs change,” the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s website touts.
However, as advocates highlighted this week, the reality is anything but.
“It’s changed in the last 12 months,” former Aged Care Assessment Team assessor and advocate director of See Me Aged Care Navigators, Coral Wilkinson told Health Services Daily.
“One of the recommendations from the Royal Commission was to streamline assessments, for there to be a single assessment system so that people didn’t have to repeat their stories.
“It was supposed to make it easier,” she said.
She said the government released an open tender for people to apply to be one of the assessing organisations. As a result, in addition to the state and territory assessing departments, there are a series of private organisation doing assessments.
Ms Wilkinson highlighted that many of those private operators didn’t have previous clinical assessment experience so have had to recruit, train and retain the clinical workforce.
Then there are some organisations that have no assessing experience at all.
“From my experience and what I’m seeing, they are the ones that have struggled the most with building both a non-clinical workforce and a clinical workforce, and being able to deliver on that,” Ms Wilkinson said.
“In different locations around the country, it’s really like a location lottery.
“MyAgedCare randomly generates where those referrals for assessment are going to go. So, some people will end up with a state or territory health department, and some will end up with any of these newer organisations.
“What that means is that, depending on where you are, that might be okay, or it might not,” she explained.
For some of her clients, they’ve waited months for an assessment even when they’ve been declared urgent.
The issue was highlighted this week on ABC’s 7.30, with one family told they would have to wait eight weeks for an urgent follow-up assessment after a man was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.
He was waiting for urgent nursing help but died four weeks before even the most urgent assessor could arrive.
There are more than 116,000 people waiting for aged care assessments around the country, almost as many as those waiting for a home care package.
Despite claims of people waiting months for an assessment, federal aged care minister Sam Rae continued to deny it.
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“The median assessment wait time at the moment is 23 days, and just in the last quarter, we saw that improve by eight days,” he said in 7.30 Report’s follow-up interview with Sarah Ferguson on Wednesday night.
“Assessment wait times are considerably improving,” he said.
However, Kathy Eagar, adjunct professor of health services research at the University of New South Wales and the Queensland University of Technology, said in a LinkedIn comment that those statistics are improbable.
“The minister used carefully scripted words and we need to unpack them,” she said.
“Given more than 100,000 people on the wait list (one third of total package capacity) it is implausible that the median wait time is 28 days for people waiting for an out-of-hospital assessment.
“I wonder if it’s 28 days’ wait from being booked for assessment to getting that assessment?” she questioned.
Ms Wilkinson said that in September, the government intervened and diverted referrals to teams that had capacity.
“So, what we’ve seen is that the organisations that had capacity have now doubled, or more than doubled, their wait times for assessment, because they’re having to take on this additional workload of comprehensive assessments,” she said.
It’s a BandAid solution. Ms Wilkson has a more sustainable idea.
She said last year’s tender document was massive and appeared to be written for big organisations, which may have been off-putting.
“Allied health clinics, physiotherapists and nurses – it’s n our nature to comprehensively assess, that’s what we do, and it’s not dissimilar to the comprehensive assessment that’s required to approve people for home care packages or classifications.
“A logical approach to this would be for the Department to create some kind of associate assessor role, and re-release a tender for organisations like nursing or allied health,” she said.
“I’ve spoken to these allied health practitioners. Some of them were previous RAS assessors and they have that experience of good, solid assessments. We could try and assist with clearing that backlog,” she said.