The future of Aged Care is Home Care

When you think aged care you probably think nursing homes. But home care is increasingly dominating how we care for seniors.

There’s been a significant policy shift that has made and will make aged care less challenging. Getting people to age at home as long as possible has long been seen as the key both to minimising costs and maximising community and individual benefit. A form of home care package was introduced by the Keating government in 1992 and various forms of home care funding have been expanded ever since. 

The aged care taskforce shows that home care is the future of aged care. In 2022, for the first time, there were more recipients of home care than in residential aged care. While we’ll always need the latter, it is only projected to grow by a relatively limited amount in terms of the number of users over the next 20 years, whereas the size of home care will nearly double.