Aged care advocacy cases rose almost a quarter in a year, and 100,191 people are waiting

The submission goes to the Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into the Support at Home Program. OPAN is the national network of aged care advocacy services, and it says of itself that it is always on the side of the older person. That is worth stating plainly at the top: this is an advocacy body making a case, not an audit. What gives it weight is the base it draws on.

What 64,591 cases look like

OPAN describes a consistent set of experiences Across more than 64,500 instances of advocacy and information support in 2025-26. Older people, it says, describe reducing or cancelling essential supports because they cannot afford increased contributions; waiting months for reassessment while their health deteriorates; receiving approvals that do not translate into practical services; struggling to understand budgets, statements and provider agreements; encountering administrative failures that interrupt care; and finding that review and appeal mechanisms do not provide timely resolution when decisions appear incorrect.

Read that list once for content and once for shape. Every item is a gap between a decision and a service: approved but not delivered, funded but not affordable, reassessed but not in time, wrong but not fixable quickly. None of them is a complaint that the reform is aimed at the wrong thing.

The waiting figures

The submission cites departmental data rather than its own for the queue. As at 31 March 2026, it says, 100,191 people were waiting in the Support at Home Priority System for an ongoing place at their approved classification or transitioned Home Care Package level. The same data has 364,723 people had access to ongoing services, including 338,049 receiving care and 26,675 assigned a place and considering whether to take it up.

So roughly one person is waiting for every three and a half who have access. The submission’s framing of why that matters is about what assessment actually decides: It determines eligibility, classification, approved services, priority and, in practice, whether an older person can remain safely at home.

The recommendation that gives the others teeth

Sixty-six recommendations is a lot, and most of them are the granular kind that only a network of advocates would write. Three at the front carry the argument.

The first asks government to adopt a rights-based access test for Support at Home, one that measures whether older people can actually receive the services they need to live safely, independently and with dignity at home, rather than measuring only assessment, approval or funding allocation. That is a direct challenge to how success is currently counted.

The second asks it to establish enforceable maximum timeframes across the whole access pathway, naming every step of it: assessment, decision-making, funding allocation, service agreement, service commencement, reassessment, urgent review and service activation.

The third is the one that makes the second checkable. It asks the department, the AIHW and Services Australia to publish whole-of-pathway waiting-time and unmet-need data covering application, assessment, allocation, service agreement and service activation for each service type, broken down by service type and region.

Our view. Recommendation three is the load-bearing one and it is the least likely to make a headline. A maximum timeframe you cannot measure compliance against is an aspiration, and the data OPAN is asking for does not exist in that form today, which is why a submission built on 64,591 cases has to describe the queue using the one snapshot the department does publish. The sequence matters: publish the pathway data, then the enforceable timeframes have something to bite on.