LANCASHIRE, Claire 0:18
Morning, folks. As always, we'll wait another moment or so, get a few people on the call, and then we'll kick off. It looks like it might be a smaller than usual crew at the moment, so I'm not seeing numbers come up dramatically, so I might make a start. Hello and a warm welcome to everyone joining us today. I'm Claire Lancashire and Lead Engagement for Support at Home. Please note this session will be recorded and made available on the department's website. If you ask a question during the session, your name and question will be included in the recording and publicly visible.
Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are virtually meeting today. I'm based on the lands of the Wurundjeri people. I acknowledge and pay respect to the contribution they make to the life of this city and this region. I also extend my respects to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who are here with us today.
As always, I go through a little bit of housekeeping just to keep us on task. I think this is now session 9, so everyone's probably tired of me hearing about the housekeeping. But again, just a quick reminder that this is focused specifically on the personal care changes. We're not looking at broader policy changes. In terms of housekeeping, though, I will give you a quick heads up that we are going to put a poll in the session today. We are incredibly grateful to those who have come along this journey and really need to get your feedback about what's worked well, what resources have you liked, and how might we use these sessions again into the future.
Before we know it, we'll be working with you on the extension of the end-of-life pathway. And we think that these have been a really good format to work with providers. So we're keen to make sure that these sessions are useful, that they're at the right frequency, that you're hearing from the right people, etc. So please do take the time to do the poll. It takes I think less than a minute to click through the options that will come up.
In terms of a recap from session 8, we focused on what providers should be finalising in the lead up to the 1st of October, stepping through the readiness checklist again, and highlighting the new Easy Read resource, which providers can use to support conversations with older people about the changes. There was a strong focus on testing and checking your arrangements before go-live, including participant information, documentation, billing processes and system changes. I suppose I wanted to give people a sense too about what are the other things that we've been doing in tandem with these sessions and readiness materials.
And so just want to reiterate that we have been working with consumer peak bodies as well. So, there are a range of communications coming out to older people to talk through the changes as we get closer to that 1st of October date. Really again, to remind them of when it takes effect, that there is no backdating, what to do if they did notice an inconsistency after the date.
And we've also provided some editorial comments to our big consumer peaks as well to put into their publications as well. And really that's with the aim of building older people's understanding, but also supporting providers that you're not the only source of advice to older people as they navigate and understand those changes as well. So hopefully that reinforces the messages that you've been doing locally with your participants. We did mention, I think, at the last session, but Penny Ward has just taken off on some well-earned leave. So I'm joined today by one of her colleagues, Sally, who will be taking you through the next part of the session. Over to you Sally, and then you'll hear from me a bit later on again.
RICHARDSON, Sally 4:58
Great. Thank you, Claire. Hello everyone, thank you for joining us today. Today, I'm going to cover where you can go for help, some of the things that could go wrong, key actions over the next month, and then we'll move to questions. You'll be familiar with this timeline as Penny has stepped you through it in previous sessions. The timeline shows where we are now, two weeks before the change takes effect.
By now, providers should be completing final participant and workforce activities, system changes and end-to-end testing. Any outstanding actions should have a clear owner and be escalated quickly if they are at risk. After 1st of October, personal care moves to the clinical supports contribution category, and participants will not pay a contribution for personal care delivered from that date. After go-live, providers should closely monitor billing, claiming, participant statements and inquiries so that any issues can be identified and resolved quickly.
As we approach 1st of October, our focus is on helping providers complete final readiness activities and resolve any remaining implementation issues. The resources on this slide are available to support your final preparations before go-live and will continue to help you after implementation. Please note that some website content and program resources will be updated from 1st of October to reflect the new personal care contribution arrangements, so always refer to the latest published information.
If you have implementation questions or encounter issues during transition, please contact the Support at Home Implementation Team. The Community of Practice will continue as a forum to raise questions, share experiences, and discuss implementation challenges. For claiming related inquiries, providers should continue to work with Services Australia through the Aged Care provider line. Our next provider information session on 1st of October will focus on implementation support, including common questions, emerging issues, lessons learnt and the ongoing support available to providers following go-live.
Critical scenarios to avoid
You'll be familiar with this user journey, so I won't step you through it in detail today. Instead, I'm using it as a reminder of the participant experience that we are trying to protect as we move through the first few weeks of implementation. Across the journey are several critical scenarios that could cause confusion, complaints, or additional work for providers. These scenarios are most likely to occur when information is inconsistent, staff are not confident answering questions, documentation has not been updated, or billing and statements do not reflect the correct treatment after 1st of October. As part of your final readiness checks, consider whether your people, processes, documentation, and systems are set up to avoid these scenarios. For today's discussion, we're focusing on the scenarios highlighted in red, as these are the ones most likely to arise during go-live and throughout October. I'll give you a moment to read these, and we'll come back to this slide during question time. Next slide, please.
So what do you need to do now? If you only remember a few things from today's session, I encourage you to focus on doing these three actions. First, make sure the billing treatment is correctly applied from 1st of October. Second, ensure your staff can explain the change clearly and consistently and respond to questions. Third, be prepared for questions about participant statements, available funding and requests for additional personal care services. Getting these basics right will go a long way towards avoiding these scenarios highlighted on the previous slide and ensuring a smooth participant experience through October.
We're now moving to questions. I will start with one we received out of session and another from a previous session. Then we will open the floor for other questions.
We received this question recently regarding when the department will publish an updated service list that reflects the changing category for personal care services. I understand that the version of the service list on the website does not yet include anything to indicate an upcoming change in the category personal care. On 1st of October we will update the service list with personal care under clinical supports rather than independence. I understand it will be helpful if the current version on the website at least flagged the upcoming change, so we will publish one shortly.
During a previous question, sorry, during a previous session, a question was asked about the Aged Care nurses award wage increase. We have a broad answer to that and we are hoping to have the updated rates published shortly.
We'll now move to questions. As this is our final session before implementation, please take this opportunity to ask any questions that you have. Our team are here to help. We have representatives on the call from Policy, IT and Services Australia available to answer your questions. Please, as per previous sessions, please raise your hand, introduce yourself with your name and organisation before speaking. Questions will be verbal only today and chat has been disabled. Some questions may need to be taken on notice for follow up out of session, and those will be addressed either in a following session or via the meeting summary. What questions do you have?
LANCASHIRE, Claire 10:55
Now Sally, as a newbie to this, sometimes we might hear crickets, but I'm going to take that as an indicator that people are feeling well supported and I personally found that kind of top three things that you flagged just before really helpful to kind of emphasise where the effort should be at.
Have we got any brave participants today who want to ask a question? This is the time to get in before we go-live. Even if it might seem silly, it's always worth asking.
We'll leave that as an open invitation, but I think we'd probably be best to enable the poll here. Again, I really just, and we're so thankful for the participation that we've had. I think today we clocked over 1200 people that have come to the sessions, acknowledge that you might have been the sole participant for your organisation through, but across all of these sessions, we're looking at about 1200 people that have come through. So we really are keen to get your feedback. It does not take very long. It will be really helpful for us as we craft other sessions and work towards it.
We might keep that open for a bit while people are working through it. But if and if there are any questions, I think we mentioned that the chat's disabled. That might not necessarily be accurate if you're able to pop a question in or come up to stage. As always, I don't want to keep people longer than we need to. So if you do complete the poll and then choose to exit, thank you so much for your participation. Continue to reach out to our team as you need in the next fortnight. We will have another session on the 1st of October at Go-Live and there may be questions there. We can also chat then about what our post Go-Live support would look like for
for people as well. And Penny will be back for that session, which is really nice that she'll get to bookend that work as well, because I know she's worked really closely with the sector.
Now, we're getting about 5 responses so far. We've got about 56 people on the call, so I'm really hoping that people will take the time to complete it. Team, do we need to keep our call open for people to be able to continue with the poll? Have we confirmed that? Okay, so we'll keep the call open, but it looks to be that there are no formal questions. as such. So thanks, Sal, for coming in today and reinforcing where we need to be. We'll make these slides available. And then if people have questions in the following fortnight, reach out through the channels that we've identified through the presentation and a big thanks to those who have sent questions in prior. Personally, I think that might be something that would be really helpful for the next session so that we can really target it where people are submitting a question possibly with their registration. We might do something like that.
Alrighty, well I might pop onto mute. We'll keep the call open for another couple of minutes to allow people to complete. I can see that the numbers are starting to drop off, but thank you for coming. Stay well and we'll be in touch.
I see that we've just had a question pop in the chat there. Have we got anyone from policy who could speak to that question about how we would differentiate when it's a mixed care visit? We might have lost our policy colleagues given that there weren't questions up front. So it might be something we need to come back
LANCASHIRE, Claire 17:57
Yeah, so it will take that on notice and come back to you. We can attempt to answer that in the published slides.
LANCASHIRE, Claire 18:15
I'm not seeing a lot of movement in the poll now, folks. I think we can call this to...
GERRISH, Prue 18:18
Thank you, Claire. Sorry, there was another question in the Q&A section from Silver Chain, wondering if Services Australia.
LANCASHIRE, Claire 18:26
Yeah, so likewise, what we'll do is pop an answer in there. I know Services Australia run a series of webinar developer forums and we can pop the links there. Given that I haven't seen a lot of movement in the poll now too, I think we can draw this meeting to a close. We'll answer the questions in the pack as it comes through and let people reach out to us over the next fortnight if there's other burning questions. Thanks all to the team that have set this up and thanks to the people that jumped into the call. I appreciate this is significantly shorter than what we'd scheduled for. I hope that's an indicator that you're feeling well supported. Thanks all.