Better Health Care Connections: Models for Short Term, More Intensive Health Care for Aged Care Recipients Program

The Better Health Care Connections: Models for Short Term, More Intensive Health Care for Aged Care Recipients Program aims to improve the quality of health care for aged care recipients.

Overview
Objectives of the Program
Who is eligible
Evaluation
Grant Program Guidelines
Invitation to Apply
Contact Information

Overview

The Better Health Care Connections: Models for Short Term, More Intensive Health Care for Aged Care Recipients Program (the Program) is a new program under the Living Longer Living Better aged care reform package.

The Government is providing $25 million (including indexation) under the Program to support initiatives to encourage aged care providers to work with public and private health care providers and medical insurers to deliver short term, more intensive health care services. This will result in improved access to complex health care, including palliative and psycho-geriatric care. The Government is providing this funding over five years from 2012-13 to 2016-17 for seed grants to develop innovative models of health care services for aged care recipients.

The Department will encourage operational aged care providers to form collaborations, consortia or partnerships to deliver projects, enabling Medicare Locals and Local Hospital Networks to actively participate in the Program. Joined-up or multi-regional approaches will be considered where appropriate.

Seed grants will be provided for activities including:

as a primary task, the development of models that build partnerships and innovative ways of working to join up the range of short term, more intensive health care services within a local area/region from which aged care recipients may need assistance;
establishment phase activities to enable operational aged care providers to be ready to start accepting aged care recipients for short term, more intensive health care services; and
development of promotional materials to encourage the uptake of practice within the aged care sector in the long term.

Applicants will also provide information to assist, and to participate in, monitoring and evaluation activities for the Program.

Objectives of the Program

The Program’s objectives are to:

develop innovative models to build better health care connections between existing health and aged care services, that are cost effective and improve the way the aged care system works within the broader health system;
improve access to complex health care services for aged care recipients;
increase awareness and information on successful models amongst aged care and health care service providers; and
diversify the aged care sector to include more complex community and residential health care services for aged care recipients.

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Who is eligible

To be eligible for seed grants applicants must be an approved provider of residential or community aged care with at least one operational service.

Evaluation

As part of a robust review, monitoring and evaluation framework, annual evaluations of the ongoing effectiveness of the Program will be conducted through an independent evaluation over four years from 2012-13. The evaluation will analyse annual formal evaluations (along with relevant progress reports) from seed grant recipients and report the results each year to the Commonwealth. Successful innovative models will be selected by the Department and their promotional materials will be disseminated by the Department to the aged care sector.

The Department will engage with stakeholders during the development of this Program through an Expert Reference Group. It will also work with the Expert Reference Group to disseminate promotional materials to the aged care sector. Timing of the distribution of promotional material will be dependent on the duration of individual seed grants.

Grant Program Guidelines

The Grant Program Guidelines are now available. The guidelines provide essential information about seed grants available, who can apply, considerations and requirements when applying for funding, and how applications will be assessed.

Invitation to Apply

The Invitation to Apply for funding under the Program closed at 2.00pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time on 21 December 2012. Potential applicants may check this website under Tenders and Grants to learn when an open competitive funding round will be open/closed from 1 July each calendar year.

Further information about the Program is detailed in the Grant Program Guidelines.

Contact Information

Queries regarding this Program can be directed by email to Aged Care Interface.
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