Aged Care & Disability

The Aged Care & Disability team manage the planning and funding of home and community services for older people and people with chronic illness in the Capital & Coast district.

These home and community care services include aged residential care, home support, palliative care, equipment, orthotics and prostethetics, information, home (district) nursing, community allied health and therapies, rehabilitation, mental health for older people, assessment, coordination, care management and other services.

These services are provided to adult age groups (aged 16 and up) on both a short and long term basis. They are particularly important services for older people, people who have recently been discharged from hospital, and people who have chronic illness, especially those in their last year of life.

The team is also leading a series of projects to improve service delivery in the home and community. The projects aim to:

have one point of contact, entry, screening, and administration for referrals and requests for information
have one evidence based assessment process linked directly to care planning and service provision
eliminate as much as possible the various funding stream, diagnosis, and short term/long term distinctions so that services can be planned and delivered in an integrated way, based on need and ability to benefit.

Collectively this work is referred to as the integrated home and community care programme which was publicly consulted on in July 2004, and approved for implementation by the Board in October 2004. Essentially there are five major deliverables to that programme:

Care Manager service
Care Coordination Centre
Specialist teams - stroke, specialist services for older people
Developing more flexible home and community services/packages
Development of a single assessment process supported by the roll out of the InterRAI MDS suite of assessment and care planning tools.

The team expects to have largely completed the implementation of the integrated home and community care programme by October 2005.

For information relating to the policy on assessing proposals for aged residential care beds, visit the Planning & Funding section of this site.