The long-term delay in new home care package funding has created a disastrous domino effect trapping thousands of older Australians and driving a national aged care crisis.
When an older person admits to hospital, their care needs often change and increase. To return home, they require access to the appropriate level of essential, government-subsidised home care support. But with funding stalled, this critical link is broken.
Without an adequate level of home care funding, older people face prolonged hospital stays – sometimes for months or even years. They become stuck, occupying a hospital bed while they wait for a permanent opening in a residential aged care home. This bottleneck is one of the drivers to the national aged care crisis. It has contributed to residential aged care homes reaching full capacity with long waitlists nationally.
The most immediate and costly consequence: more than 2,500 older Australians are currently stranded in public hospital beds while they wait for a room in a residential aged care home. This costs taxpayers nearly a billion dollars a year! This doesn’t account for the many stuck in private hospitals. They cannot go home; they can’t get a bed in residential aged care – stuck in a Federal Government created limbo – it is an absolute disgrace!
This failure of funding jams the entire health system. Critical hospital beds are unavailable for people who need acute care, which also contributes to emergency department gridlock and ambulance ramping.
For many, this situation could be avoided. They could go home if they had Government home care at the right funding level to support them, but there are 90,000 people in that queue already. Or they could be assessed in hospital for immediate home care funding, but home care assessments occur at home and with a massive backlog of 123,000 people waiting for assessment means immediate funded help is impossible.
The result is a system failure: older people are stuck in hospitals and often face premature admission to residential aged care. This crisis has now spread across the entire continuum of care, jamming our hospitals, home care system, and residential aged care homes – a profound failure to treat our elders with the respect and dignity they deserve.
This article by Julia McCarthy appeared in the October 2025 edition of Village Voice.