COTA Australia opens consultations on home care

The responses provided to COTA through their consultations in Hobart, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne throughout October and November, and the surveys, will offer feedback on the state of self-management in the home care system and assist the seniors advocate in developing Self-Management Toolkits.

Chief Executive of COTA Australia, Ian Yates, says the consultations will glean first hand insights into self management in home care packages, namely, the tasks and activities required to successfully self-manage; and the training and development required for staff, consumers and carers.

“Hearing the voices of older Australians, their carers and aged care providers is absolutely imperative in developing proposals to enhance choice and control within the home-care system,” he says.

“These consultations are a timely opportunity for people with lived experiences in home care to share their thoughts on self-management, identify information gaps and workshop the training and development required to support self-managed home care.”

The project, which commenced in June 2017 and will run for around two years, aims to capture what’s happening in the sector at the moment and identify what opportunities there are for the future.

“The project will collect information about what level of self-management is occurring today and identify the training, support and information that organisations require to offer increasing levels of self-management to their consumers, and consumers need to self manage,” Mr Yates says.

“This is the opportunity for people to have their say about what self-management should look like, how it can be developed to best support consumers and carers, and the providers who make it available to their clients.”

Following the consultation phase, COTA will be looking to partner with a handful of providers to pilot self-management and demonstrate the success it can have for both the provider and consumers, as well as making the toolkits available to approved home care providers and their staff, and for consumers and carers who participate in the Project’s Home Care Package Self-management trial in 2018.

“After this consultation phase of the project, the feedback will be further developed in conjunction with a co-design group to create toolkits that meet the needs of approved home care providers, and their consumers or carers,” he says.

“These toolkits will be a key resource for the self-management trial to occur in 2018 and will be updated with the lessons from the trial before being made available after the project concludes.

“The project team will be seeking an expression of interest over the coming months from approved home care providers who are interested in participating in a limited trial around self-managed home care offerings to their consumers.”

More information including dates, times and locations of the upcoming consultation periods, as well as registrations, are available online.