Hello everyone,
We are now a few weeks into our Winter Menu and we hope you are enjoying a few different meal options in this menu with a few extra winter-warmers on offer.
It has been extremely busy as we head into another winter here. We have lots of new clients on service – some of you may have noticed that because some of our delivery runs are a little longer, your meal delivery times might be slightly altered as well. We do apologise if this has caused any inconvenience for you.
We try our best to organize the deliveries in a logical manner so they are grouped geographically for our volunteer drivers but sometimes we may get a group of new clients who are all in the same part of town and this will always impact our delivery schedule.
Following the release of the federal budget, we have been advised that the new Aged Care Act will be delayed until 1st July 2025. This gives the Department more time to work through the feedback provided from the sector, including providers, consumers and their advocates, and to hopefully provide a better set of guidelines around how aged care is to operate into the future.
The negative side of this delay is that we are waiting on clarification about the future structure of the sector, how we will be funded, how client budgets will be managed and if that is going to impact the way we operate on a daily basis. Of course, we anticipate better regulation and accountability for providers who do the wrong thing which will increase confidence for consumers about the quality of services they will receive.
So, we await further clarification on all these matters, as we have been since the Royal Commission into Aged Care 5 years ago. It’s been a very frustrating period of limbo, given that the first, and most significant recommendation from the Royal Commission was that a new Aged Care Act would be in place by 1st July 2023.
None of this will impact our service delivery to you in the meantime – it is business as usual for us here at Meals on Wheels. We will update you with any useful information as it becomes available.
Thank you.
Kerryn Williams
Manager