Speak Out Digital Edition June 2016

Policy & Advocacy

“Speech pathologists should be an essential member of the care and support

team for older Australians.”

federal government investigate the service delivery model of speech pathology services in residential aged care with a focus on contracting arrangements. Importantly, you recommended that a cost benefit analysis be completed that considered the current funding of speech pathology services in the aged care sector. Whilst it is unfortunate that we are still waiting a government response to your final report, we want to assure you that our Association has valued your work and over the past year and a half, has invested our member resources to address some of your recommendations that were able to be advanced without government support. Many of these are within the aged care space. I would be happy to speak with you about these however I will now hand over to Dr Bennett to highlight some workforce challenges identified in recent research into the speech pathology aged care workforce that we have co-led. Although, we are still awaiting publication in peer reviewed journals, preliminary results indicate that speech pathologists working in the aged care sector have identified a number of challenges to ensuring older people have access to our expertise. Critical barriers to services include current funding and service delivery models that emphasise swallowing assessment and do not fund communication intervention. Staffing ratios are so low and case load pressures so high that care can be compromised. These pressures often lead to ineffective adherence to our clinical recommendations for aged care clients. This is made worse by the prevalent sub-contracting arrangements where speech pathologists are largely unable to influence policy and procedures within a facility and have restricted opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary care.

As the roll out of the aged care reforms progresses, we are growing increasingly concerned about arrangements that appear to further restrict rather than enhance access to speech pathology services for older people—particularly those with communication problems and those within community and home based settings. This has repercussions on our workforce planning within our profession—we know there is significant demand for our services but there are persistent barriers to supply. We are still seeing a lack of awareness of the need for communication interventions in residential aged care and funding for these services. We know the entry point to the aged care system relies heavily on an understanding of communication and swallowing problems and the need to refer to speech pathologists by Regional Assessment Service Assessors. Sub-contracting arrangements for private providers are growing increasingly complex and problematic for our private sector. Furthermore, we are still experiencing significant difficulty getting all speech pathologists listed as providers on the My Aged Care website. We believe that Australian Government leadership is crucial to progressing aged care workforce planning in the context of the aged care reforms. Whilst the sector has an important role to play in identifying and improving workforce planning for the aged care sector broadly, in a competitive market place, it is unrealistic to expect the “sector” to determine the solutions in isolation from government. We are certainly a profession that would welcome concrete support from government to help our workforce planning and design. Thank you.”

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June 2016 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

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