Ensuring Support at Home Delivers Safely and Equitably for Multicultural Older Australians
ECCQ submission to the Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into the Support at Home Program.
Introduction
The Ethnic Communities Council of Queensland (ECCQ) is Queensland’s peak body for multicultural communities, working across policy and advocacy, aged care service delivery, aged care cultural capacity building, and health programs for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. This submission draws on consultations with CALD aged care providers and their care partner teams, individual older people
and their families, and a short-term community of practice bringing together several multicultural service
providers across Queensland.
It responds to the Committee’s terms of reference, in particular the ability to access services and live safely, the impact of co-payment contributions, pricing mechanisms, financial hardship, the transition from CHSP, and thin markets.
Our evidence is not only about problems that are unique to CALD communities. Support at Home is complex for everyone. But layering culture, language, stigma, and distrust of formal systems on top of that complexity means CALD older people experience its failures earliest, hardest, and most often in silence. Availability of services is not what determines access. What matters is whether people have the knowledge, confidence, trusted relationships and community support needed to understand, navigate and benefit from those services.
