The Aged Care Wait Times Crisis: Is Support at Home the Solution?

Of course, the 2025 aged care reforms will attempt to fix all of this over time. The Support at Home program, in particular, will instantly replace the Home Care Package program and phase out CHSP, which will become obsolete in 2027. The Australian Government has stated that its goal with these changes is to reduce average wait times for support services to three months within the first two years of the new program.

But will that actually be the case?

Will Support at Home improve aged care wait times?

To some degree, the aged care reforms have already started.

Though the Support at Home program’s official launch was delayed, some key elements of the new system are well underway.

Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT)

The government introduced a new Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT) in July 2024, replacing the National Aged Care Screening and Assessment Form. Billed as ‘one dynamic tool for all assessment types,’ the IAT helps assessors collect more complete information from home care applicants and provide precise service recommendations and referrals. Care applicants, meanwhile, no longer have to bounce around to different assessors, and they only have to tell their story once.

This new assessment tool was the first in what will ultimately be several responses to the 2021 recommendations by the Royal Commission, which concluded that aged care assessments were producing poor outcomes. The Commission deemed the system too complex for care recipients and their families to navigate; often, older people had to visit different assessment organisations as their needs changed, resulting in inconsistent results and inefficient service delivery. The IAT aims to amend that by serving as a comprehensive assessment tool.

Single Assessment System

Along with the IAT, the government also unveiled a new Single Assessment System in December 2024. The new system has three fundamental parts:

1. The Integrated Assessment Tool covered above
2. A Single Assessment System workforce
3. New assessment organisations for First Nations care recipients designed to provide more culturally safe pathways for older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

The new workforce combines assessors from the Regional Assessment Service (RAS), Aged Care Assessment Teams (ACAT), and the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) and effectively replaces those organisations. Under this new arrangement, all organisations conducting aged care needs assessments can perform home support assessments for all types of available care—not just specific types.

So why is that important?

Under the new arrangement, assessment organisations (referred to as ‘Needs Assessment Organisations’) will provide the entire scope of assessments, including both clinical and non-clinical assessments.

In other words, there will no longer be dedicated organisations for different types of care. The same organisation will provide all the necessary assessment services, meaning care recipients won’t have to change assessment organisations—they will remain with the same one even as their needs evolve, facilitating a more efficient and streamlined assessment process. Multiple assessment organisations will exist in every region, too, so if demand in your area surges, the bottlenecks that hamstring the current system will no longer occur.

Indeed, these new initiatives seem positive, but how will it all come together when the Support at Home program launches?

That’s the question of the moment, and some industry experts believe a turnaround won’t be as straightforward as we all might hope.

Could aged care wait times actually get worse under Support at Home?

As a completely new system, Support at Home is bound to have some speed bumps.

Components such as the Single Assessment System and Integrated Assessment Tool certainly seem like they’ll address flaws in the current system, but those initiatives don’t cover the entire breadth of care delivery. Specifically: Once assessments are complete, what happens further down the line, when it’s time to determine and assign actual services?

An Aged Care Expert Weighs In

Jim Moraitis is a Biomedical Engineer and the founder of VillageLocal, an organisation that helps seniors navigate the aged care labyrinth.

With a background in healthcare technology, aged care navigation and advocacy, Jim has spent years deciphering government terminology and picking through the bureaucratic red tape that pervades the sector, and he believes the wait-time crisis will worsen under Support at Home before it improves.

‘With Home Care Packages, if you need a new service, you can shuffle things around in your existing care plan to get access to those services—as long as your provider agrees that you require those services and you have the funds,’ he says.

‘But under Support at Home, you can’t just ask your provider to change your home care plan; instead, you’ll need a reassessment to get approved for that additional service, especially if you’re requesting something categorised under a different service type.’

The Support at Home program will feature a defined service list. This will include three types of categories:

1. Clinical Care (such as nursing care)
2. Independence (such as help with showering)
3. Everyday Living (such as gardening and house cleaning)

Each category will have its own service types and participant contribution arrangements, and assessments will determine which services are available to home care recipients. That means you will not automatically be eligible for services on the list—you must be assessed as needing the service to receive it.

To Jim’s point, when Support at Home launches, the system could be flooded with requests for assessments: both from new home care applicants and from existing care recipients needing to be reassessed for different services. This could be problematic for two reasons:

1. If Support at Home follows the current model, these service requests will undergo a ‘triage’ via My Aged Care to determine if they are clinical or non-clinical. This part of the process has historically been hampered by rigid, bureaucratic discourse, which causes delays and bottlenecks. For proper context, the Integrated Assessment Tool User Guide explains triage thusly: ‘The purpose of triage, and the triage section of the IAT, is for an assessment organisation to validate the appropriateness of a received assessment referral and to collect information relevant to assist with the assessment process.’
2. A flood of assessment requests can also be problematic because requests deemed ‘clinical’ are passed to clinical assessment teams. However, there is a finite number of clinically trained personnel qualified to handle such requests, so approval could be delayed further if those personnel get inundated with requests.

Of course, clinical requests are the most urgent: Care recipients who require clinical support typically need that support immediately, and long delays caused by an inflexible, prescriptive system simply aren’t an option. Unfortunately, thousands of older Australians and their families have experienced that emergency firsthand in recent years, and if experts like Jim are correct, similar dilemmas will persist under Support at Home—perhaps temporarily, but also, perhaps in greater numbers.

You’re on the aged care wait list: Now what?

If you find yourself stuck on a wait list now or in the future, there are some strategies you can explore to secure the support you need. Importantly, your next move largely depends on where you are in the process: have you had an assessment already, or are you on the wait list to take that initial step? 



Our guide, Navigating the Aged Care Wait List: Tips for Seniors & Their Families, goes into extensive detail about what you can do depending on where you are in the application process. Make sure you download that to get a full understanding of all your options.