The new Aged Care Act, which has still to be passed and faces a Senate inquiry later this year, will impact on the way that care services are delivered in retirement villages.

The existing Home Care Package program will be replaced by Support at Home from 1 July 2025. The current four Package levels will be replaced by eight different classifications to provide greater flexibility in funding for care recipients.

Already on a Home Care Package?

Existing Home Care Package clients and those waiting on the National Prioritisation System will not need to be reassessed.

Instead, they will be assigned to one of the new classifcations with a budget that aligns to their current Home Care Package level (or the level they have been approved for and are waiting to access). If their needs increase in future, they would be reassessed into a new Support at Home classification with a higher budget.

Annual Support at Home budgets will be broken into quarterly (three-monthly) budgets.  Under the proposed changes, participants will only be able to carry over unspent funds of up to $1,000 or 10% of the quarterly budget (whichever is greater).

The indicative budget amounts for each ongoing classification are:

The Department of Health and Aged Care will also commence a small trial of a proposed ‘Shared Care’ model from mid-next year that could be rolled out more widely in retirement villages.

What is ‘Shared Care’?

The concept of Shared Care is to take a small portion of a large number of village residents’ Community and Home support packages and apply those funds to the full village, which would deliver economies of scale and investments in wellness supports for all residents.

An example would be instead of saying 10 residents each utilising their individual home support packages to be individually taken to the shops to buy their groceries, part of those funds would be used to fund a village bus trip where one bus and one driver takes 10 people to the shops.

Another example would be for the collective funds to pay for a village nurse, who would not only look after people on Government-funded Packages but also the other village residents and with the better health support, more likely arrest their pending acuity.

If successful, the model could help to deliver significant savings to village residents relying on home care services – yet another reason that life is better in retirement living.