Inner Sydney Voice was one of the organisations that made a submission to this audit. On behalf of the collective experience of small to medium CHSP providers in the region, we affirmed the vital role of CHSP in delivering flexible, relational and community-based care for older Australians. The report handed back to the department gives the sector more tools to advocate for the endurance of early-entry care, which we know despite being undervalued performs a critical role in communities.
The audit asked three questions to evaluate the effectiveness of the CHSP: does CHSP meet community need, are services delivered effectively and is the CHSP meeting its objectives. Throughout the report it is clear that the department does not have answers to these questions of effectiveness, nor have they dedicated time and resources to collecting them.
We should take note that only one performance measure — the number of people who access the program in a year — is reported on by the department. On this simple evaluation criteria, the department meets their target: almost 850,000 Australians use CHSP to access services like meals, transport, gardening and social supports. Yet this number communicates nothing of whether the lives of these clients are improving. It is also unclear whether or not these supports are reaching the vulnerable communities most in need of care. On behalf of the Regional CHSP Leader’s Network, Inner Sydney Voice told some of these stories in our submission and welcome the resulting recommendation that the department seeks meaningful engagement with providers and clients for a more holistic evaluation. We know that currently, the focus is primarily on how grants are spent rather than the quality-of-service delivery or outcomes for older people.
In spite of these conditions, the providers delivering CHSP still manage to support so many older Australians and their families in their independence and connection. We heard these messages repeated at the Community Aged Care Regional Symposium we held this month. The local organisations in our region delay entry into high-cost hospitalisation and residential care. The expertise and goodwill of place-based services are caring for their communities often without sufficient or sustainable funding.
The department has agreed to implement the audit recommendations. This commitment, paired with the recent announcement for another 12-months of funding for SSDs (Sector Support Development Officer) in CHSP, represents a meaningful opportunity to sustain and properly fund these critical community services. Whilst disappointingly late (just weeks before funding was due to end), the confirmation has helped avert further neglect and under-resourcing of early entry systems.
We hold that a proper evaluation of the program (which will be the first in the decade it has been running) will show that we cannot neglect universally accessible and community embedded early-entry care in favour of a transactional service model. The sector is now entering an important period of making the risks of that known to decision-makers.