Webinars attended by thousands

9 July 2021

In June 2021, the Department of Health hosted four webinars about the aged care reforms.

The webinars were an opportunity for anyone interested in the aged care reforms, including consumers, aged care workers and providers to hear about the reform program and provide input on how we can work together going forward.

The webinars covered an overview of the reforms, residential aged care, home care, and information and technology.

What we heard

There is enormous interest in the aged care reforms. 2,390 people attended the overview webinar, 1,313 the residential webinar, 1,110 the IT webinar and 2,887 attended the home care webinar.

You want to be involved. More than one third of webinar attendees also participated actively and provided us with feedback via our interactive tool, Mentimeter.

Webinars and enewsletters are the best way of reaching the aged care workforce. The majority of the people that attended the webinars were current workers in the aged care sector (55%). You told us across all four webinars that you want to be informed or engaged with the reforms via Direct Email (81% of respondents) and Webinars 76%, with Online Workshops a significant third at 58%).

The main area you said you wanted us to focus on were supporting and upskilling the workforce, which consistently rated high in responses. (e.g. 57% of people identified it as a key area in the Overview webinar, and 75% in the residential webinar with another top response when we asked about quality and safety in residential home care).

You also want us to focus on the in-home care sector. (36% and 37% chose expanding and improving home care in the Overview webinar. The Home Care webinar attracted the most interest of all our webinars – 2,887 participants). You also told us funding arrangements are really important, with 34% in the Overview webinar, flagging that as a key area for change.

What we're doing

We’ll be working to keep engaging with you and hosting more webinars, particularly on overarching topics like the reforms, in the future. Sign up to our engagement database to stay involved.

Currently, we’re working with business areas that are developing projects within the aged care reforms on how they can run online workshops to get more in depth on topics where we need your input. So watch this space for online workshops on specific topics in the future.

Due to the huge interest from the workforce and in workforce topics, we’ve scheduled another webinar in August to specifically talk about workforce-related reforms. You can sign up to attend here.

Enewsletters will be another focus – bringing together enews in the Group and making sure that we engage with you consistently and regularly that way. You can either sign up to our engagement database or if you’re in the sector already, you can sign up to our sector announcements and newsletters.

We’ll engage with you on in-home care – and we’re already working on that. Several business areas are working on projects, from the new overarching home care program to the home care Serious Incident Response Scheme, and they are making engagement planning a priority – watch this space, as they expect to be engaging with you in various ways on these topics in the coming months.

We’ll bring you more information on funding arrangements in the future. A webinar about the proposed AN-ACC funding model has been scheduled for 27 August as an initial step.

We’re working to analyse your more detailed responses within the webinars right now and as we get more insights into specific topics, we’ll be feeding those into the program areas that are working to reform aged care.

We’ll continue listening to you. We got a lot out of the webinars, so thank you for attending and participating. We want that to continue, so please continue keeping an eye on this Engagement Hub and working with us to improve the aged care sector.