Support at Home – 9 Steps to Take Now

Many providers are still operating on legacy rates well below Appendix G benchmarks in the CHSP Program Manual and are leaving money on the table. The Department does not initiate pricing reviews – unless you seek a revision, they will assume your current pricing is sustainable. 

Many providers undercharge based on assumptions about affordability, but doing so can undermine long-term sustainability. Charging fees in line with advice from the Department (Appendix G, once again) will assist in bringing your overall unit pricing in line with HCP pricing.

The program manual allows for face-to-face assessment hours to be charged to the Department. This is overlooked by many providers, with hours often absorbed as overhead or left unclaimed.

In Home Care Packages, many providers offset short-duration services (e.g. 30 minute visits) with surcharges to cover fixed costs like travel and admin. Under CHSP and SaH, that’s not permitted, which means delivering short services can become loss-making. Consider a two-hour minimum for Domestic Assistance services and 1 hour minimum for Personal Care.

There is significant flexibility in how you allocate and acquit overhead costs. Ensure that you are assigning all overhead involved in delivering the services to avoid underclaiming.

In our experience working with providers, this is one of the most misunderstood areas. The Department’s advice does not prohibit surcharges on third-party purchases, but clarified that they must be reasonable and accompanied by basic consumer protections. This appears to be rolling forward into the Support at Home program.

Our modelling indicates that it will not be possible to compensate for the loss of Program Management fees without introducing a higher surcharge on these services. The justification on the Department’s website for keeping these fees low in the past is that most of the cost of setting up these services would be covered by the Program Management Fee. This fee is disappearing, so by logical extension, these surcharges will need to increase significantly.
 

In our work with providers, we’ve seen that the single largest area of loss in the transition comes from client-level budget mismatches. Some clients will generate less revenue under the new model, while others may exceed their budget limits, with providers unable to recover the overspend. For many organisations, this shift will come as a surprise.

Use the lead up to 1 November to proactively identify which clients are likely to fall into these categories, and begin adjusting service plans to maximise budget utilisation and avoid avoidable losses. This not only smooths the transition but also reduces the risk of budget-driven service disruptions once SaH begins. 

The single largest driver of financial performance is the quality of the work undertaken by the scheduling team. A trend we’ve observed across numerous operational reviews is that providers with strong logistics consistently outperform their peers in both margin and efficiency. StewartBrown benchmark data indicates that the best-performing providers are achieving gross margins of up to 45%, and we believe that high margins will continue, and be necessary to recover head office overheads in SaH.

Even small losses in scheduling efficiency can compound – a 1% drop in gross margin often translates into a 2% reduction in EBITDA due to increased overhead pressure. This is the time to assess your rostering processes, systems and team capability, and ensure your scheduling function is accurate, well supported and optimised.

With any major reform, there will be both disruption and advantage. The providers who benefit most will be those who proactively assess where new opportunities lie and begin aligning their resources now. 
We’ve seen that even small strategic pivots – targeting new client segments, refining models of care, or repositioning service offerings - can make a significant difference post-transition.

SaH will open up new pipelines to explore, expose weaknesses in some business models, and create space for niche or differentiated approaches. Use this time to clarify your positioning: where can you grow, where are you strongest, and what internal capabilities need to shift?