Hello everyone and all the best for a happy, healthy and peaceful 2026.
We have officially entered a new era in Aged Care in Australia. The new Aged Care Act and all of the associated standards and regulations came into effect on 1st November 2025.
Service Providers been bombarded with a range of new requirements that are covered in the new Aged Care Act. All of these changes are designed to ensure a high quality of service with consumer choice and safety being at the centre of all service arrangements.
We hope you can bear with us in coming months as we endeavor to update all our documentation in accordance with these new expectations under the Aged Care Act.
Whilst some of these changes make sense, they are aimed at plugging holes in a system where some Providers were not doing the right thing. I’d like to think we have been rigorously fulfilling our obligations through our existing processes and documentation. However, we must adhere to the directions we have been given and our ongoing government funding depends on our compliance with all of the new regulations.
We are now required to have a signed Service Agreement with every single consumer – a slightly more formal (and lengthy) document from what we have used in the past. This agreement is to be reviewed every year in consultation with each consumer, so we ensure that our services are meeting the identified needs of each person we support.
There are also a number of documents that we are required to provide all clients of our service, including the new Statement of Rights and the Code of Conduct, which we are featuring in our newsletters. We must also develop a Whistle-Blower policy; we must provide regular reminders about how you can contact us to provide feedback or, importantly, how to make complaints about any issues you have with our service. These are just a few of the new mandatory requirements for all aged care service providers.
I remain somewhat skeptical about how much better aged care services will be as a direct result of these new rules and regulations – it feels a bit like ‘box-ticking’. However, if these changes do succeed in raising the quality of care across the whole aged care sector then perhaps it will be worthwhile after all.
Kerryn Williams – Manager