Indigo Shire workers providing home care to the elderly and people with disabilities or other disadvantages face being made redundant if the service is cut by the council.
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A report by development and community services director Mark Florence, to be presented to councillors on Tuesday night, recommends ending the agreement to provide the Home and Community Care service by June 30.
The council would work with the federal and Victorian governments, and other parties to manage clients’ transition to a new private health providers under the National Disability Insurance Scheme, before it is likely to be forced to be 2020.
Mr Florence’s report stated the home care program had been an important part of the council’s work with the community since the 1980s, but government funding and control had changed over the past 10 years.
“The Commonwealth has a clear agenda to create a consistent and affordable national program to provide an integrated suite of aged care services from entry level ‘home support’, to more comprehensive ‘packaged care’ arrangements to support independent living and through to residential care,” he said.
“It is in the interests of the Commonwealth, council and ultimately clients to have diversity in the market of providers.
“It is in council’s long-term interest to increase the capacity of local community and not-for-profit services to operate efficiently and effectively.”
The program costs Indigo Council $1.54 million to run each year, with 34 part-time care workers and seven office-based support staff.
But it is not completely covered by grants and client costs – it ran at a $196,260 deficit in 2016-17, which was expected to increase to $284,000 in 2017-18.
Council staff worked a total of about 13,800 hours with 500 home care clients during 2016-17, at an average of 30 hours per client.
Instead of working with ambiguity about the future, at a high cost to ratepayers, Mr Florence recommended councillors rescind the agreement with six months notice.
He recommended the council “accepts that this decision will have a significant impact on staff and commits to meeting all industrial relations obligations, which may include redundancies, transition support, redeployment and retraining support”.