{"id":78074,"date":"2026-08-22T22:43:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T22:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/78074\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T22:43:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T22:43:07","slug":"while-government-reviews-aged-care-algorithm-waitlists-are-growing-and-people-are-dying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/78074\/","title":{"rendered":"While government reviews aged care algorithm, waitlists are growing and people are dying"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The idea of an Independent Assessment Tool didn’t drop from the sky, we didn’t come up with it.”<\/p>\n

“It was a very important recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aged Care.”<\/p>\n

That’s what the Minister for Health, Mark Butler, said at a press conference last Tuesday, when asked about the aged care algorithm, featured in our Four Corners investigation the night before.<\/p>\n

For clarity, the “Independent Assessment Tool”, or IAT, that the minister refers to, is not the algorithm. It’s the questionnaire completed by a clinician when assessing someone for aged care services. It was recommended by the royal commission.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the computer algorithm is a secretive formula devised by the government which scores people on the amount of aged care funding they should receive. It was never recommended by the royal commission.<\/p>\n

Conflating the two \u2014 the questionnaire and the algorithm \u2014 has been a common tactic of the government and the Department of Health.<\/p>\n

The reality is that these are two very different things, and their development and testing processes stand in stark contrast.<\/p>\n

Loading…Not a job for public servants<\/p>\n

The questionnaire or IAT was tested on 22,000 people; there were three working groups involved in its development which included some clinicians; and there’s a detailed report on its development and trial which is publicly available.<\/p>\n

The algorithm underwent no live trial before it was launched; the Department of Health has been unable to give the name of any clinicians who signed off on it; and there’s no detailed report explaining how it was developed and tested.<\/p>\n

In fact, despite senators making a formal Order for the Production of Documents, the government has refused to release anything beyond publicly available Department of Health material.<\/p>\n

The algorithm’s design, evaluation and implementation are all details that have only been gleaned through some rigorous questions from the Coalition, the Greens and Senator David Pocock at Senate estimates.<\/p>\n

Waiting for aged care<\/a><\/p>\n

A long-time ABC reporter is one of nearly 100,000 Australians waiting on a crucial aged-care assessment.<\/p>\n

Through those responses, it’s been revealed there was a prototype of an algorithm \u2014 believed to have been designed by a consultancy \u2014 which was taken in-house by bureaucrats, modified and validated by them, and launched on November 1 last year.<\/p>\n

Public servants have given evidence that they used data from 200,000 assessments to test and verify the algorithm at the back end, but there was no live trial.<\/p>\n

Professor Kathy Eagar, honorary professor at UNSW, has a strong opinion on that: “[Public servants] should never have been asked to do a job that is so technically sophisticated.”<\/p>\n

Eagar should know. She designed a classification algorithm used to allocate funding to people in residential care. She led a team of researchers and experts in the field and her report was published in the Medical Journal of Australia. It contrasts starkly with what’s happened with the algorithm at the centre of this controversy.<\/p>\n

For our Four Corners, Eagar reverse-engineered the Support at Home algorithm and explained its flaws \u2014 that there’s more than 500 questions in the IAT but the vast majority do not feed into the algorithm; that the detailed notes recorded by the clinician in more than 100 text boxes cannot be read by it; and that issues such as frailty, cognitive problems, mental health and carer fatigue come into the equation far too late to have any impact on someone’s funding, and therefore the amount of care they receive.<\/p>\n

Regarding other problems, she revealed that a one-point difference at a particular juncture in the algorithm equates to almost $40,000 a year lost or gained in funding.<\/p>\n

Questions linger for government<\/p>\n

There’s little doubt that the government is aware of the problems.<\/p>\n

Thousands removed from official aged care waitlist <\/a><\/p>\n

A Four Corners investigation can reveal the number of people waiting for full aged care funding at home stands at almost 154,000 \u2014 not 100,000 as officially reported.<\/p>\n

The Senate has now voted for it to be ditched; the Ombudsman is investigating it after 800 complaints; and the government itself has committed $18 million to reviewing both the IAT and the algorithm.<\/p>\n

Independent MPs are comparing it to Robodebt \u2014 something the Coalition has avoided doing for obvious reasons \u2014 and backbenchers report being inundated with calls from their constituents.<\/p>\n

When summing up the issue on Tuesday, Butler acknowledged the problems, saying the government was “doing everything we can to monitor the rollout of this scheme” and “where we think we need to modify it, we’ve indicated a commitment to do that.”<\/p>\n

The question is, why doesn’t it allow clinicians to override the algorithm’s decisions when they think it’s wrong \u2014 at least while it is being reviewed and refined?<\/p>\n

It could compare funding decisions made by clinicians and the algorithm, as would have occurred in a real live trial.<\/p>\n

Instead, the government voted down a Senate amendment to allow human override.<\/p>\n

It says it will legislate a new pathway, allowing assessment agencies to ask for reviews of decisions when necessary.<\/p>\n

That’s not much different to what’s in place now, except it’s the older person or their family who has to lodge an appeal.<\/p>\n

Loading’People are giving up’<\/p>\n

In its first five months, more than 1,000 people asked to have the algorithm’s decision reviewed \u2014 that’s six times the number from the entire financial year before its implementation.<\/p>\n

The government says that’s still less than 1 per cent of all assessments, indicating that it’s not a real problem.<\/p>\n

Eagar disagrees. “The reason that it’s a very small percentage is because it’s too hard and complex to appeal and also people are giving up,” she told Four Corners.<\/p>\n

“They know that if they appeal, the appeal is being considered by the very department that developed the system.”<\/p>\n

If the government wants a true indication of the level of feeling in the community, perhaps it should read the thousands of comments on Facebook where discussions about the algorithm, long waitlists, and people dying are growing by the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“The idea of an Independent Assessment Tool didn’t drop from the sky, we didn’t come up with it.”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4745,111211,22,21,4281,2547,6263,26591,17813],"class_list":["post-78074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-aged-care","tag-algorithm","tag-au","tag-austrlia","tag-four-corners","tag-government","tag-mark-butler","tag-senate","tag-senate-estimates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}