Let people choose a provider and sign an agreement while they wait, not after
An older person waits about 189 days for a budget to be assigned, and is then given 56 days to research providers, compare them, meet them and sign an agreement. Nothing about that work requires the money to have arrived first.
Steps this would change
Rationale
The aged care access process models at 349 days against
a published median of 347, which makes it the only process in this database whose
structure has been checked against an outside number. The wait profile is 230
days queue, 77 applicant, 35 assessment, 7 scheduling.
Within that, the sequence at the end is the part a procedural reform can reach.
The person is approved. They wait roughly 189 days for a budget to be assigned. The assignment arrives, and a 56 day clock starts in which they must select a provider, compare offerings, arrange meetings, agree a care plan and execute a service agreement.
That is the most demanding piece of consumer decision-making in the entire process, and it is placed at the very end — on a person who has by then been waiting the better part of a year, who is very often less well than when they were assessed, and who may now be managing it through an adult child in another city.
None of it requires the budget to exist. A person could choose a provider, agree a plan and sign an agreement that commences on assignment, at any point during the 189 day wait. The provider knows the approved services and the priority category. The only thing missing is the money, and the money is not an input to any of those decisions.
Done properly, the day the budget is assigned is the first day of service rather than the first day of shopping.
A second and cheaper half. The department publishes the 347 day total and the 245 day approval-to-commencement figure, but not the assignment queue as its own number — the 189 days in this model is derived by subtracting the agreement window. A queue that is not published as a queue cannot be managed as one, and publishing it costs nothing.
Who acts: the Commonwealth alone. No state, no council, no other party.
What is being traded away
Choosing a provider a long time before service starts is choosing on stale information. Over six months a provider's availability, staffing and quality can change materially, and the person's own needs almost certainly will. An agreement signed in month two for services beginning in month eight may be the wrong agreement, and the person is now locked into it at the moment they are least able to renegotiate. Any version of this needs a free right to switch on assignment, which providers will resist because it makes their pipeline unreliable.
It shifts unpaid work onto providers. Onboarding a client who may not convert for six months, at a point when more than 60 per cent of residential homes are operating at a deficit and home care margins are thin, is a real cost. Providers would reasonably prioritise clients closer to assignment, which recreates the queue inside the provider rather than removing it.
It may make the wait look shorter without making it shorter. Fifty-six days off 349 is 16 per cent. The other 189 days are rationing, and this proposal does not touch them and must not be presented as if it does. If it is used to report an improved headline while the assignment queue is unchanged, it has made the problem harder to see. The published median exists precisely so that cannot happen quietly, which is an argument for publishing more of these numbers, not fewer.
Precedent
Conditional and provisional arrangements pending a funding event are ordinary practice across government. Providers already hold service agreements that commence on a future date.
Sources
- Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, published Support at Home wait time data: median 347 days end to end, 245 days from approval to service commencement, 27 day median assessment wait in 2024-25
- My Aged Care, published 56 day service agreement window
- Senate inquiry into Support at Home, reporting 24 November 2026