A HOME care provider that delivers services on the Mornington Peninsula says the current home care crisis could be alleviated by more people accessing the telehealth option.
Floyd Gomes, who runs Atticus Health, says many peninsula residents are still waiting for home care, with providers Mecwacare and Bolton Clark struggling to find staff since taking over the service from Mornington Peninsula Shire Council earlier this year.
“The feedback we get from our own home care managers is that those affected by the service handover and continued lack of personnel are still experiencing very long waits for services,” he said.
“To tackle this, they’ve been told to keep calling the providers Mecwacare and Bolton Clarke to ask them to escalate the issue. However, there is a very long wait on the phone to get through.”
Gomes, whose Atticus Regional Medicentre in Hastings recently won the council’s health and community award, said empowering clients to connect directly with their own GPs via video telehealth was making a significant impact to his clients.
Under the telehealth model, home care clients are supported to have video appointments with their regular doctors, who already have knowledge of the clients’ health and medical needs.
While its suitability depended on services required, it could reduce the length of waiting lists, he said.
In 2021, the COVID-related Medicare funding was expanded to allow continued access to telehealth appointments, including to those receiving in-home care, provided the necessary equipment and staff capability were available to support telehealth services.
There are four levels of home care packages, with federal government subsidies ranging from $9000 a year to more than $52,000.
A range of health care providers can provide telehealth services, including GPs, nurses, specialists and consultant physicians, allied health providers, and mental health professionals.
Gomes said clients were able to get quality care in most instances with increased flexibility and service choice through telehealth, but that the current poor integration between many home care and health care providers meant it was not being utilised well.
“What we are doing to bridge this issue in an innovative way is using telehealth with a GP while the home care worker is present at a patient’s home, to facilitate that integration. Telehealth has an excellent role to play here,” he said.
Gomes said research showed that 92 per cent of elderly people wanted to stay in their homes, “but hardly anyone gets to do that”.
Peninsula home care clients have been caught in the middle of the former Morrison government’s decision to move home care servicing to private providers (“Home care crisis after switch to private providers” The News 4/7/22).
Because of delays transferring information about clients to the private providers Mecwacare and Bolton Clarke, many clients missed out on vital support for up to six months, and some say they still do not know when that help will come.
Staff shortages in the aged care and home care sectors is further delaying support for clients.
The Centre for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) says the country is facing a shortage of at least 110,000 direct aged-care workers within the next decade unless urgent action is taken to boost the workforce.
However, Dr Annie Banbury, head of clinical research at telehealth platform Coviu, has told the media that uptake of telehealth is still low, and that more training is needed to support more aged care staff in transitioning to a 21st century model of care.
First published in the Southern Peninsula News – 20 December 2022
