Future of home-based care in Pyrenees Shire Council

Published on 20 July 2022

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Pyrenees Shire Council has been delivering aged and disability services to our community for many years. We are immensely proud of our services and staff members. We are gratified to be working within our community, supporting people to stay in their homes longer, delivering community connection, and running programs and events for our clients.

This year, the Commonwealth funding that helps support us to deliver these services and programs will change, which will have a detrimental effect on our ability to continue delivering these services.

The changes include the funding amount, needing us to cover a larger subsidy for our community that we cannot afford.

Our service is small, delivering over 13,000 hours of services to our community in 2020-21. Our existing services are varied and essential to supporting our community members with care needs to remain at home.

In comparison, larger local government organisations can deliver around 120,000 hours and private providers more than three million hours of service.

We have been monitoring the local government sector’s response to these changes and working closely with the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) and taking advice on the options available to us.

We have decided to seek expressions of interest from relevant agencies who could provide ongoing services in our region following the new Commonwealth provisions.

Once we have had a look at the EOIs received, we will review our position as a service provider.

We will continue to support our staff, who have been outstanding in delivering services, and our community during the expressions of interest and review period.

We are continuing to investigate, and we will keep our staff and our community up to date with what those investigations find.

Please accept that this is an ongoing process and no decisions have yet been made.