What standard of care do Australians expect for their loved ones and themselves in old age?
Is it the 8 minutes a day that Australians in aged care are currently entitled to? Or do we aspire to the international benchmark of 22 minutes a day, suggested in the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, handed to the federal government in 2021?
This is the question that the Australian Council of Deans of Health Sciences put to the community in 2023.
The Australian Council of Deans of Health Sciences represents Australian universities which provide undergraduate education in the clinical allied health sciences. As such, the ACDHS represents the institutions which are responsible for ensuring that Australia has enough well-trained professionals to deliver on the integrated health needs of Australia’s ageing population.
In 2023, the ACDHS commissioned modelling to establish whether Australia was on track to meet the recommended level of care and what policy decisions it would take to achieve it.
The modelling found that, in order to meet the target of 22 minutes a day by 2033, Australia would need to train another 25,000 allied health professionals. Due to the high demand, obstacles to supply and the overall time required to increase the number of fully qualified allied health professionals, the training would need to start immediately.
The ACDHS shared the findings with the relevant government minister. In order to involve the broader public in the discussion, Agenda C ran a mini-campaign on social and traditional media to publicise the results.
We launched the findings from the model in The Australian, to ensure policy makers heard the message. The findings also ran in high-traffic media outlets such as the Daily Mail and Yahoo!News and got picked up by 141 online, print and radio outlets.
Our social campaign feature piece was a short explainer video, bringing to life the problem in simple terms, and engaging creative executions that ran across all of ACDHS’ channels.
