RoboCare, Call Centres and the Support at Home Maze: Why the System is Generating its Own Crisis

By A Concerned Reader  

Australia’s Support at Home reform was sold as a modernisation: streamlined access, consistent assessments, reduced confusion and faster care.

Instead, only weeks into implementation, the system is generating avoidable reviews, unnecessary reassessments, rising frustration and growing administrative waste – not because staff are failing, but because the design guarantees it.

This is not a story about blame. It is a story about systems behaving exactly as they were built to behave.

A system designed a decade ago is colliding with today’s reality

Much of the architecture underpinning My Aged Care, centralised intake, and algorithm-driven assessment pathways traces back to 2013–2014 – an era defined by:

• cost containment
• marketisation
• outsourcing
• call-centre triage
• performance metrics
• automation as a substitute for professional judgement

The system has evolved since then, but its core logic has not changed: separate intake from assessment, separate assessment from service delivery, and control access centrally.

Support at Home didn’t create this structure – it amplified it.

Why Support Plan Reviews are suddenly exploding

Support Plan Reviews (SPRs) are now flooding back to assessment teams for reasons that often have nothing to do with clinical change. Common triggers include:

• a family member asking about wait times
• a provider explaining something incorrectly
• a request to change providers
• confusion about CHSP top-ups
• uncertainty caused by the removal of interim packages

My Aged Care displaying different information to what was assessed. In many cases, when assessors contact families directly, they discover:

• the family was satisfied with the assessment
• no reassessment was requested
• no priority escalation was sought
• the issue was informational, not clinical

Yet an SPR has already been generated.

Why this keeps happening

This isn’t about call-centre staff doing the wrong thing. It’s about how call-centres are structured, trained and measured.

Centralised intake staff typically operate under:

• strict call-time targets
• throughput KPIs
• scripted pathways
• limited clinical training
• limited ability to resolve ambiguity
• limited escalation support

In that environment, the fastest way to “resolve” uncertainty is often to create a referral or review.

Not because it’s correct – but because it closes the call.

This is a known phenomenon across government service systems.

Assessors are now absorbing downstream noise

Assessment teams are not funded for Support Plan Reviews. They are funded for new assessments. The result is a perverse incentive loop:

• families are pushed toward reassessment even when it is unnecessary
• reassessment can reset wait times, disadvantaging clients
• assessors spend time undoing system-generated confusion
• clinical time is diverted to administrative clean-up
• frustration increases across every layer

The system appears busy.

The outcomes do not improve.

Automation in the wrong place

Support at Home introduced an algorithm that determines eligibility levels and priority – and explicitly prevents assessors from overriding it.

The Department insists this is “not AI, just an algorithm”. Technically, that may be true. Functionally, it behaves as automated decision-making with limited transparency and no real-time correction mechanism.

At the same time, the area crying out for automation has been ignored:

• real-time provider billing transparency
• standardised service ledgers
• automated detection of under-delivery or over-charging
• clear consumer-readable records of what has actually been provided

Instead of Robo-accountability, we got Robo-eligibility.

The result is predictable: care is rationed at the front door, while inefficiency persists downstream.

This is not a workforce failure.

Assessors are doing what they were trained to do.

Call-centre staff are doing what their systems allow.

Providers are navigating rules that change faster than guidance.

The problem is design rigidity, not individual competence.

When professional judgement is constrained, systems compensate by generating volume – reviews, reassessments, complaints – until something gives.

What will happen next if nothing changes

If current settings remain:

• Support Plan Reviews will become the next backlog
• reassessment demand will rise sharply
• government costs will increase, not fall
• assessor burnout will accelerate
• families will lose trust
• advocacy complaints will escalate
• “only a handful of appeals” will become a meaningless statistic

None of this is surprising. Every comparable system internationally followed this arc.

What would actually help

The fixes are not radical:

• restore limited clinical override pathways
• stabilise rules before enforcing compliance
• improve call-centre escalation and training
• stop using reassessment as a catch-all resolution tool
• automate provider transparency, not eligibility restriction
• treat assessors as clinicians, not data entry points

Most importantly: acknowledge that complexity cannot be eliminated – only managed well or badly.

This moment still matters

The Support at Home reform is not doomed. But it is currently generating avoidable harm through preventable design choices.

The system is telling us something – loudly.

The question is whether those designing it are prepared to listen.

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