Updates to the Regional Assessment Service
Published on 01 July 2024
As of Monday 1 July 2024, AccessCare is no longer contracted to deliver the Regional Assessment Service (RAS). However, both AccessCare and the City of Kingston remain as committed as ever to providing aged care services in our community.
Read more about the City of Kingston's commitment to providing aged care on their website here.
The Regional Assessment Service is a Commonwealth Government service that assesses people’s eligibility for the Commonwealth Home Support Programme (CHSP), which is the program providing entry level home help services to older Australians.
Since the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, the Commonwealth Government has been talking about establishing a Single Assessment System for aged care, which will merge RAS with the Aged Care Assessment Services (ACAS). ACAS is a similar service to RAS, except it assesses people’s eligibility for higher level services, including Commonwealth funded residential aged care, Home Care Packages (HCP) or residential respite care.
This merger is a part of Australia’s ongoing aged care reforms, where the Government aims to combine the CHSP with HCP to create one in-home care support service, which we believe is to be called Support at Home.
The Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care presently engages Department of Health in Victoria (the Department) to deliver RAS in Victoria. Subsequently, the Department subcontracts this responsibility to various agencies in Victoria, including City of Kingston. As such, for many years, Kingston, through AccessCare, has been involved in assessing local residents’ eligibility for the CHSP through its RAS team. This contract ended on Sunday 30 June 2024, with the assessments for support in Kingston now to be handled by a Western Australian company called Access Care Network.
Please do note that AccessCare and the City of Kingston remains as committed as ever to providing its senior residents with in-home care services through AccessCare. This change will have absolutely no impact on our existing clients, and nothing will change from a service perspective.
AccessCare will also continue to take on new clients, and our team is still available to support members of the community to navigate My Aged Care and arrange an assessment.
If you have any questions about RAS or the ongoing aged care reforms, we encourage you to contact our team on 1300 819 200.