Redefining Care: Self-Management Across All Home Care Models
There’s no official government definition of self-managed home care, but it’s a term that clients and providers often use and aim for. It’s widely seen as a goal for anyone receiving government-funded care.
While the Aged Care Act 1997 doesn’t directly say that people can choose their own care providers or manage their own care plans, it clearly supports the ideas of choice, flexibility, and independence. These ideas are also backed by the User Rights Principles 2014 and the Aged Care Quality Standards — and they remain important under the new Support at Home program that replaces Home Care Packages.
So where did self-management come from? It started with the introduction of Consumer Directed Care (CDC). This gave people the right to:
choose the types of services they need;
decide how those services are delivered;
choose who delivers the services;
set the times that suit them; and
work with providers to create a care plan and budget that reflects how involved they want to be in managing their support.
So, What Now for Self-Managed Home Care?
To understand self-management, it helps to start with what it’s not. The opposite model is a Full Service provider, where nearly all care services are delivered by the provider’s own employees — everything stays “in-house”.
Under the new Support at Home guidance, self-management is described financially as involving independent, third-party providers chosen by the client — not simply used to fill gaps in the roster. In these cases, providers need to add a surcharge to cover the work involved in managing external services (like compliance and oversight).
In practice, self-management happens whenever a client obtains services from organisations who are not part of the registered provider, and it can exist across all provider models:
Full Service or Traditional Providers — where clients insist on using external organisation for support workers, even though the provider may prefer in-house staff.
Shared or Hybrid Providers — where the provider offers their own workforce but also actively supports and enables the client to choose external care workers.
Independent or Brokered Providers — where the provider has no in-house workforce and helps the client build a care team from scratch or based on third-party recommendations.
At its heart, self-management is about control. It gives people more say over who delivers their care and how. The government supports self-management because it reflects the principles of evidence based best practice Consumer Directed Care (CDC).
