Senior officials within Australia’s Department of Health, Disability and Ageing faced significant challenges in the lead-up to the November 2026 launch of a new algorithm designed to determine funding packages for older Australians receiving home care support, according to recently released emails obtained through freedom of information requests.
The communications reveal that while assessors had long been assured by the department that they would retain the ability to override the algorithm’s funding recommendations based on their professional judgement, a critical review shortly before rollout uncovered that proposed legislation explicitly prohibited such discretion. The Aged Care Rules 2025, drafted to govern the use of the Support at Home (SaH) classification tool, effectively mandated that assessors must accept the algorithm’s outcomes without modification.
This legal constraint prompted an urgent briefing involving the aged care minister, Sam Rae, and health minister, Mark Butler, just days before the system was due to go live. Senior departmental officials warned that removing the human override option increased risks, including potential confusion among assessors who had been previously told they would exercise clinical judgement to adjust funding allocations. One email dated October 29 cautioned that despite public statements affirming assessor override powers, the regulations left “no legal discretion” to do so, complicating the rollout and necessitating last-minute updates to the Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT) user manual to clearly communicate this limitation.
The IAT requires assessors to gather detailed information about an older person’s physical, social, and personal circumstances, which the algorithm then processes to determine eligibility and levels of government-funded home care. However, without the ability to override the algorithm’s classification, assessors have reported concerns that vulnerable individuals may be under-assessed and consequently receive insufficient support.
On October 24, Rachel Blackwood, an assistant secretary at the department, alerted deputy secretary Greg Pugh to the legal discrepancies arising from the conflicting messaging about override authority. Although department staff had regarded override powers as settled policy, the legislated framework dictated otherwise. While Blackwood proposed various solutions and outlined associated risks (details of which have been redacted), Pugh indicated on October 26 that the chosen course—presumably adhering to the legislative restrictions—was the best option given the imminent rollout deadline.
Blackwood later emphasized the importance of maintaining trust with assessment organizations and providing clear guidance to delegates to uphold integrity and accuracy in their work. It remains unclear why the department opted to revise assessors’ instructions rather than seek legislative amendments to restore override capabilities. The Department of Health did not respond to requests for comment.
Following the November launch, Blackwood reported to senior colleagues that numerous complaints had emerged from assessors uneasy about the inability to override the algorithm, with concerns centered on systematic under-assessment of client needs. By November 20, she noted that most aged care needs assessment organizations, including state and territory governments, were raising alarms about algorithmic decisions that allegedly failed to align with older Australians’ actual requirements.
Additional documents indicate that state health officials maintained logs of hundreds of such cases, forwarding these reports to federal authorities for review. The controversy underscores tensions between technological decision-making tools and professional judgement in the administration of aged care funding in Australia.