SPONSORED FEATURE
Defining the future Workforce pressures, lessons learned from COVID, and the aged care reform agenda will be among the hot topics centre stage at this year’s ACSA National Summit.
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here will be much to discuss at the upcoming Aged and Community Services Australia National Summit. Not least of all – amid the COVID pandemic and the implementation of the reform agenda – what the future holds for Australia’s beleaguered aged care sector. Titled Aged Care 2.0: Getting it Right, ACSA’s 34th National Summit aims to find solutions to ensure older Australians receive quality care in the years and decades to come, says ACSA chief executive Paul Sadler. “Our starting point of the whole program is to have a look at the five key areas that the Government has identified for the aged care reforms,” Sadler tells Australian Ageing Agenda. They are home care, residential aged care services and sustainability, residential aged care quality and safety, workforce and governance. ACSA has added a sixth pillar for discussion, says Sadler – retirement living and housing. A major focus of the summit is to analyse how the 26 | MARCH – APRIL 2022
Paul Sadler
Mike Baird
Libby Lyons
reform agenda is going. “The intention is for the Department of Health to bring us up to date on some of their key reform initiatives and for us to engage with them about those initiatives,” he says. From ACSA’s point of view – and the views of other aged care representatives it has surveyed – the reform agenda hasn’t got off to a particularly good start, says Sadler. “There have been
