Living Longer. Living Better.
Better Health Care Connections
The Government has undertaken significant reform to our health system to bolster our primary care and preventative care services to keep people out of hospital, to help people stay well in their community and importantly to ensure the health and wellbeing of Australians as they age.
Building links between aged care and the health and hospitals system is a strong focus of the Government’s health reforms. Many older Australians are in hospitals because they have nowhere else to go. A quarter of all aged care residents enter hospital every year. Approximately 30% of these admissions could be avoided if a GP or other primary health care professional was available.
Medicare Locals are a central component of the Government’s primary health care reforms. Their roles include better linking aged care with GPs, nursing and other health professionals and hospitals; and identifying gaps in delivering primary care to residential and community aged care at the local level.
Better palliative care and support in aged care ($21.7 million)
End-of-life care, or palliative care, is an issue of great importance to Australians as they age. The Government is acutely aware of the pressure and anxiety that comes with end-of-life considerations and the overwhelming desire for an individual’s wishes to be respected. We are committed to ensuring older people and their families have the support and assistance to allow end of life planning to be about personal control and choice.Aged care providers need to be appropriately skilled to look after people needing palliative care. The Government will provide direct access to specialist palliative care and advance care planning expertise through palliative care innovative advisory services.
This proposal aligns with the National Palliative Care Strategy, which aims to raise awareness of and information about palliative care and its benefits, and help build a skilled workforce across the health system to deliver quality palliative care.
Promoting better practice and partnerships ($58.5 million)
The Government is introducing 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 involve grants to develop models of service which will remove barriers including regulatory road blocks, and aged care funding adjustments. This will result in improved access to complex health care, including palliative and psycho-geriatric care.The Government will support implementation of innovative ways of delivering aged care services, and support translation of research into everyday practice and actual care delivery. Innovations will be shared and promoted. Projects that promote innovation, improved care and better business practice in priority areas of care will be targeted. These include care for people with dementia, mental illness, and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds or other special needs, and palliative care.
Significant barriers exist for people receiving aged care, particularly people in residential care, to access primary health care. Multidisciplinary care – encompassing GPs, nurses, and other primary health care providers, specialists and aged care providers - will be increased. This includes telehealth trials and removing barriers to accessing primary care for people with particular needs, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and those living in rural and remote areas.