Pathways in Aged Care

There are many and varied paths through Australia’s aged care system according to a recent report from the AIHW. The report, Pathways in Aged Care : program use after assessment, looks at aged care program use by a group of 105,000 people who had completed an assessment by an ACAT team in 2003–04. One-third of this group had not previously used aged care services.

The report examines assessment patterns, care pathways, time to entry to permanent residential aged care and time to death over the 2 year period following their first assessment. One of the findings was that for many people, their first contact with the aged care system is through an ACAT assessment. "For example, just over 40% of the cohort with no previous use of aged care programs accessed Home and Community Care or Veteran’s Home Care services following an ACAT assessment, even though no ACAT assessment is required to access these programs. This suggests that the ACAT assessments seemed to be a way of getting information about community care programs."