Three assessment workforces into one, on a five-year contract
Since December 2024 all aged care assessments have been done by one workforce using one tool, replacing Regional Assessment Services, Aged Care Assessment Teams and independent AN-ACC assessors. The contracts run five years.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This database argues for merging duplicated assessment constantly. Here it was done, at national scale, and it is worth setting out precisely what was merged because the pattern is the one this site keeps proposing elsewhere.
Before. Three separate assessment arrangements. Regional Assessment Services assessed people for entry-level home support. Aged Care Assessment Teams assessed people for higher-level home care and residential care. Independent AN-ACC assessors separately assessed residents to determine the funding classification their home would receive. An older person whose needs increased was reassessed by a different organisation, against different criteria, using different instruments.
After. Since 9 December 2024, a single workforce conducts all aged care assessments. The Single Assessment System commenced under the Aged Care Act 2024 in December 2025. Assessment uses one standardised national instrument — the Integrated Assessment Tool, covering twelve sections and incorporating eleven clinically validated tools.
And the contracting is the part this site should highlight. The assessment contracts awarded in December 2024 run five years, at $1.5 billion.
Compare what this database has criticised twice: adult public dental, funded through an agreement running eleven and a half months at a time, and mental health, extended by a single year after the Productivity Commission found the framework not effective. And compare what it praised in legal assistance: reviewed before expiry, renegotiated before expiry, five years.
Aged care assessment did both things right — it consolidated the function and funded it on a horizon an organisation can hire against.
What it did not do. It did not shorten the queue that follows. The published median wait for a Support at Home assessment was 27 days against a journey measured in hundreds. A merge that makes the assessment coherent does not create a funded place at the end of it, and this site should not let a good structural reform be quoted as a fix for a rationing problem. See The median wait fell and the queue grew. Both are true..
What is being traded away
Consolidation concentrates risk in one workforce and one instrument. If the Integrated Assessment Tool systematically misreads a particular presentation — cognitive impairment, cultural difference, someone who understates their needs — that error now applies to every assessment in the country rather than to one of three systems. Diversity of instruments is inefficient and it is also a hedge.
Specialist expertise can be lost in a general workforce. The old Aged Care Assessment Teams were clinically weighted for complex and residential assessments. A single workforce doing everything from entry-level home support to residential eligibility must maintain that depth across a much broader remit, and whether it has is an empirical question that will show up as assessment quality rather than as elapsed time.
Five-year contracts lock in providers as well as funding. The horizon that lets an organisation hire also makes it hard to replace one that underperforms before 2029. Certainty cuts both ways, and this site has praised long horizons often enough that it should say so.
And enacted is not evaluated. This is the seventh reform on this site marked
enacted, and none of them has been graded yet. The ANAO has the aged care single
assessment system on its potential audit topics. That audit, when it happens, is
what will establish whether this worked — not the structural logic set out above.
Precedent
Enacted. The single workforce commenced 9 December 2024, the Single Assessment System commenced under the Aged Care Act 2024 in December 2025, and $1.5 billion in five-year contracts were awarded in December 2024.
Sources
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: since 9 December 2024 all aged care assessments conducted by a single workforce, replacing Regional Assessment Services, Aged Care Assessment Teams and independent AN-ACC assessors
- $1.5 billion in five-year assessment contracts awarded December 2024
- Single Assessment System commenced under the Aged Care Act 2024 in December 2025; Integrated Assessment Tool covering 12 sections and integrating 11 clinically validated tools
- ANAO potential audit topic: aged care single assessment system