Monitoring the Impact of Changes to the Aged Care Funding Instrument
Growth in funding to aged care providers under the Aged Care Funding Instrument is tracking as expected, following changes made in July.
View by date:
Previous MinistersPDF printable version of Monitoring the Impact of Changes to the Aged Care Funding Instrument (PDF 221 KB)
3 October 2012
Minister for Ageing Mark Butler today confirmed that growth in funding to aged care providers under the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) was tracking as expected, following changes made in July.
“The Australian Government has increased funding for residential care from $8.8 billion in 2011-12 to $9.1 billion in 2012-13,” Mr Butler said.
“To ensure expenditure grows in line with this estimate and to address higher than expected growth over recent years a number of changes to the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) were introduced on 1 July 2012.”
“At my request, the Department of Health and Ageing established an ACFI Monitoring Group to monitor expenditure growth and the impact of the 1 July changes.”
Mr Butler said the monitoring group, which includes consumer, provider and clinician representatives, has met twice since the changes to the ACFI were introduced.
“Early data for claims for care funding made by providers in July was considered by the group and this data shows that average subsidies increased from $133.96 per resident per day in June to $134.83 in July.”
“This is in line with the department’s modelling and shows that funding is increasing to the sector.”
There were over 10,000 appraisals undertaken in July giving a good sample of the 160,000 people in aged care facilities at any one time.
The figures are inconsistent with claims from some aged care provider groups of ‘cuts’ to aged care funding of over $50 per day, or $18,000-$23,000 per year, for every affected resident.
Both Leading Aged Services Australia (LASA) and Aged and Community Services Australia (ACSA) have claimed that funding will be cut by hundreds of millions of dollars in 2012 and beyond.
“These claims of funding cuts are clearly untrue, as these early figures are showing,” Mr Butler said.
The monitoring group will continue to meet on a monthly basis to review expenditure growth and the impact of the measures that were introduced on 1 July 2012.
For more information, contact the minister’s office on 02 6277 7280
Help with accessing large documents
When accessing large documents (over 500 KB in size), it is recommended that the following procedure be used:
- Click the link with the RIGHT mouse button
- Choose "Save Target As.../Save Link As..." depending on your browser
- Select an appropriate folder on a local drive to place the downloaded file
Attempting to open large documents within the browser window (by left-clicking)
may inhibit your ability to continue browsing while the document is
opening and/or lead to system problems.
Help with accessing PDF documents
To view PDF (Portable Document Format) documents, you will need to have a PDF reader installed on your computer. A number of PDF readers are available through the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) Web Guide website.