Workforce Supplement for aged care services 065-13040080

On 20 April 2012, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Mental Health and Ageing released a comprehensive 10-year package to reshape aged care. The Living Longer Living Better aged care reform package will build a better, fairer, sustainable and nationally consistent aged care system to meet the social and economic challenges of the nation's ageing population.

The reform package included an announcement that up to $1.2 billion would be made available through the Addressing Workforce Pressures initiative to better support the people who work in aged care. This initiative will be delivered in two parts - through the Aged Care Workforce Compact and Supplement, and the Aged Care Workforce Development Plan developed during 2013.

The Workforce supplement file was sent to Services Australia Aged Care Help Desk via email each month as needed.

Department of Social Services (DSS) only emailed a file if a change had been recorded to the Workforce Supplement eligibility for one or more services for that particular month. The aged care program moved from DSS to the Department of Health and Aged Care through a machinery of government decision.

Note: the file needed to be loaded before the start of the next claim month.

Sufficient time needed to be allowed to ensure that any errors could be dealt with before the next month's run.

DSS emailed the Aged Care Helpdesk a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file.

The following lines represent the details of the entry, the:

• first value was the service ID
• second value was the start date in the format DDMMYYYY
• third value was the end date in the format DDMMYYYY
• fourth value was for comments (generally blank)

System for the Payment of Aged Residential Care (SPARC) was a read only system from August 2022 and decommissioned in December 2023. See Aged care System for the Payment of Aged Residential Care (SPARC) data requests for more details.