NADIA MITSOPOULOS, HOST: Have a listen to Sam Rae, who is the Aged Care Minister.
SAM RAE, MINISTER FOR AGED CARE AND SENIORS: Good morning, Nadia. Thank you for having me.
HOST: How many beds in Perth, and where will they be?
RAE: We've got to come back to what we're trying to achieve here, Nadia. We want every Australian to be able to access safe, dignified, and high-quality aged care, including every Western Australian. Today's announcement is about breaking a cycle. For too long, we've seen underinvestment in some key hotspots even though we've had rising demand, and metropolitan Perth is one of those four key hotspots that we've identified across the country. So we're investing $115 million in order to break that cycle of underinvestment and, over the next two years, bring on the projects that deliver the services that people need and deliver them as quickly as possible.
HOST: Okay. So first of all, of that $115 million, how much will come to Perth?
RAE: Well, there are four hotspots, and as I said, Perth is one of the four that have been identified. We're going to run an expression of interest process so that we can get all of the various projects that are close to being viable. And the idea is that we then relatively evenly spread that $115 million across the four hotspots in order to get the best possible outcomes for the community.
HOST: So how many beds are we potentially talking about here?
RAE: Well, I want to go through the expression of interest process, because I think that will uncover a whole range of opportunities. What we're looking at are the types of projects where a lot of work has already been done in many cases, and perhaps they are still maybe a few million short of being a viable project. And so, ideally, where we get to is a situation where we can see all of the best options on the table and we can make the investment to get the best bang for buck for older people.
HOST: So you're talking about new aged care facilities that are- you're talking about projects that are already in play here?
RAE: Nadia, I'm talking about any options that get additional beds on the ground in metropolitan Perth. I want to get as many beds as possible. I want the services that accompany them to be very high-quality, to offer dignified care to older people. So I don't want to be hemmed in. I don't want to cut ourselves off from opportunities to get as many beds as possible.
HOST: You don't want to give me numbers. You don't want to give me numbers.
RAE: The number is 115 million. It's an unprecedented investment in terms of capital investment in aged care across these hotspot areas. This is about breaking that cycle of underinvestment. $115 million is an unprecedented investment, which allows us to break the cycle to work with the sector to get better outcomes for older people.
HOST: So do you know if there are current proposals coming out of Perth for new facilities or expansions of existing facilities?
RAE: There are a whole range of projects that wonderful people across sector in Perth and WA more broadly have been working on. And there are some challenges. There are always challenges that come with these sorts of projects. Sometimes those challenges are financial, and that's what this program is designed to support with. Sometimes they're workforce challenges, and as you know, we're investing very heavily in skills and training, making sure that we've got these amazingly dedicated and highly skilled aged care workers. Sometimes they're planning challenges within local government or state government systems.
So we're trying to work through these complex issues. Unfortunately, hard problems rarely have easy answers, and that's why we're working closely with the Western Australian Government and my counterpart, Simone McGurk, to knock down the barriers and get the best outcomes for Western Australians.
HOST: On 102.5 ABC Perth, you're listening to the Aged Care Minister, Sam Rae, about extra funding for extra residential aged care beds here in Perth. And who will get these beds? Will these facilities be for people that are currently in hospital?
RAE: Well, this is the aim of increasing supply within the residential bed system, Nadia. If we can increase supply, we can take some of that pressure off the hospital system amongst other parts of the community who are seeking residential care. So, yes, absolutely. The idea here is that if we can have some additional beds brought into the system as rapidly as possible, that will take some of that pressure off the delayed discharge issue, which we all know is a long-standing, very complex issue. The State Government and the Federal Government have been working together on that. So yes, this is absolutely one of the ways that we can take some of that pressure off.
HOST: But again, any beds that we see under this funding are probably still a couple of years away. That's fair?
RAE: Well, it depends on the maturity of the projects. And we're going to be prioritising projects, as I said, through this expression of interest process. We'll prioritise the projects that are as close to being ready to bring beds on as possible. We want to get these beds brought on as quickly as possible. There's a number of things to balance, obviously. We want to make sure that the care is going to be very high quality. We want to bring these beds on quickly and we want to bring on as many as possible in metropolitan Perth as we can.
HOST: There are currently, in WA public hospitals, 349 elderly people taking up public hospital beds that should be in residential aged care. Now, we have hospitals operating pretty much at capacity every day. What else can you do to alleviate that problem? Because this is your problem to fix.
RAE: Well as I said, delayed discharge is a very long-standing and very complex issue. And I think that we need to speak sensitively and respectfully about it when we do. Our public hospitals are, of course, there to care for people who are sick, who are unwell, who require that medical attention, and old people have every right to access that care, same as everybody else. That said, we do have some scenarios, some situations in which older people would be better cared for in a residential or other care scenario. So…
HOST: 349 of them in Perth, that's a lot.
RAE: As I said, I think we need to be really careful, Nadia. Older people have the same right to access care in the hospital as everybody else. I don't want us to get into a situation where we are through, you know, perhaps an insensitive public conversation, deprioritising older people in our public healthcare system. I don't believe we are, but that's why I think we need to be so careful about our language here. That said, we do want to make sure that if older people can be better cared for in residential care or other care scenarios, we're investing in order to make sure that that's possible.
HOST: Minister, what about regional WA? Because we hear quite a bit from people who say, you know, their- somebody in their family will be offered an aged care place, but it might be three or four hundred kilometres away and not in their town. Will there be towards increasing supply in regional WA?
RAE: This round is a special round to target those four hotspots, including metropolitan Perth, but we'll be running our normal round of ACCAP, the Aged Care Capital Assistance Program, which targets those rural and regional areas outside of the MM1 zones to make sure that we continue to invest in services across regional Australia.
HOST: If I can just look at the Support at Home program, we are hearing that some people are being told they'll have to wait up to a year for a Home Care Package. Is that too long?
RAE: Firstly, I should make this point. Older people tell us they want to stay in their homes for longer. We now have a record number of people provided home services under our new Support at Home program. We've got over 350,000 Australians now provided with Support at Home services. So we've seen unprecedented demand in growth- or growth in demand rather, I should say, for those home care services, and that's a good thing. We want people to be able to age in place, stay at home, stay connected to their communities. It's also good for the system. But you're not wrong. We have struggled in order to keep pace with that growth in demand. Really, I don't want to be too partisan about this now but three and a half years ago, we inherited a system, and people would remember the Royal Commission, a system that was groaning under the weight of cuts and neglect under the previous Liberal government. We've increased funding to that system by 40 per cent in just the last three years. We're in the process of releasing an additional 83,000 Home Care Packages through Support at Home this year alone, this financial year alone. So there is significant work going to make sure that every old Australian can get the care that they deserve.
HOST: We're also hearing that some people are deciding not to take up all the services that they need because they don't want to pay for it. So will we be in a situation where there may be people out there at home that are not getting all the care they need under this program because they don't want to fork out the money?
RAE: What you're referring to there is under the new Support at Home program, there are co-contribution arrangements that are means tested. And essentially what that means is that where people can afford to make a contribution to their non-clinical care they're being asked to do so, but they are means tested. We have no data that suggests that people are foregoing any kind of care, and indeed when it comes to clinical care, the Federal Government continues to fund 100 per cent of clinical care under the program.