Our clients enjoy more carer hours than clients of traditional home care providers.

We offer better value than traditional home care providers in three main ways.

Empowered Ageing:

  • Has lower fees which frees more funds to pay for care workers and aids. This means you have more dollars to spend at the same home care package level.
  • Enables you to hire care workers, purchase aids and other assistance at open market rates, which are usually much less than the rates charged by traditional home care providers. This means you receive more assistance per dollar spent.
  • Delivers more appropriate care because it is you the care recipient who directs the care worker, not an absent manager back at the provider's office. This means you receive more genuine assistance per carer hour, by avoiding wasting labour on unnecessary tasks and by receiving whatever help you ask for on the day.

Low Fees = More Care

As a client you have a certain amount of funding from which to pay for your care and fees.

If your fees are lower, there will be more funds available for spending on your care.

Empowered Ageing avoids much of the overheads of employing many care workers. By empowering clients to supervise and direct their care workers, we avoid the staff management costs. This efficiency allows us to offer you better value as a care recipient. We find many care recipients want to manage their own care. This is a win - win situation.

My Aged Care Comparisons

The My Aged Care website displays information about home care providers so potential clients can compare providers. This information lists administration fees, however, it unfortunately fails show the all the financial benefits of self management. If you compare Empowered Ageing to traditional providers based upon the listed administration fees, typically our fees are noticeably lower. But also remember self management allows you to avoid wasting funding of services the traditional provider pushes at clients but the client may not really benefit much from. Self management means the client actively chooses their services or accumulates funding, rather than the traditional provider actively using up the funding with their rostering.


Care Worker Hourly Rates

Graph showing traditional aged care providers charge higher rates for care workers than can be sourced with Empowered Ageing.

These are typical costs of a care worker per hour to perform domestic assistance. The hourly rates of care workers vary due to qualifications, contracts, day of the week and many other factors. To investigate rates and the recruiting of care workers click here.

Traditional care providers have traditionally sidestepped discussing their pricing of care workers by instead talking about the number of carer hours they provide for each home care package level. At Empowered Ageing we believe in transparency and that the dollars matter.

Avoid Monopoly Pricing

Traditional home care providers send workers into your home and charge you an hourly rate for them. The provider sets the rate. This is essentially a monopoly market whereby you purchase all your care needs from that provider.

Traditional home care providers hire care workers on wages or contract, then charge them out to clients at a higher rate. This is reasonable as there are overheads in managing staff. However, you have no obligation to support an industry full of administration overheads. Your care funds are for your care, not for running an administratively heavy industry.

Empowered Ageing enables you to hire care workers at market rates. You can hire care workers through multiple sources at the same time. You can hire care workers directly without an agency. You are not locked into hiring care workers from us.

Workers Get Better Paid

With our approach to home care the care workers tend to be paid more than those working for a traditional provider. The aged care industry has traditionally not paid high wages. Our new approach is a trend for increasing the pay of care workers.

Many of the potential workers have experience working within the large organisations running aged care, and may still do so. From the worker's perspective, working instead for individual clients means better pay, more direct care, better client relationships and a more pleasant work atmosphere. These workers are likely to prefer to go to a shift for one of their individual clients than a shift for a large organisation. Happier workers are likely to have happier care recipients.


Example: Gardening

Gardening is a common and valid care expense. But gardening can mean different things to different clients.

One client just wants their lawn kept short and tidy. So, they contract a local lawnmowing business to visit regularly to mow, trim edges and blow paths clear. The lawnmowing worker turns up and just does the job with perhaps no conversation as they want to get as many lawns mown per day. The lawnmowing business hires people who are quick workers and don't get distracted. The lawns might even get mown while the client is not at home. This gives good value to the client who really only wants short grass.

Another client enjoys growing flowers from seed but needs assistance with carrying the watering can, digging the soil and bending down. This client really wants an experience of gardening. This client wants a gardener who is patient, knowledgable and willing to be an assistant. Conversation about plants, the soil, seasons and the environment is an important part of the task. This means the gardener needs to love plants too and not be trying to get the task done as quickly as possible.

People are all different, with different personal values, so different clients have different ways of maximising value from their home care package.

With Empowered Ageing it is the client who can recruit the best gardener to suit their idea of gardening.

Grandma holding bunch of cut flowers.

Avoid Wasted Carer Hours

Workers sent into your home by traditional providers answer to their employer and follow the list of tasks in the client's care plan, as prepared by the provider. The care plan might be reviewed annually. The care workers can get into trouble if they do not complete the tasks in the care plan. This applies even if the tasks do not need doing. For example, a care plan could quite reasonably set the task of cleaning both bathrooms once a week. However, the client may know one of the bathrooms has not been used since it was last cleaned. The worker is still required to clean the unused bathroom or risk getting into trouble.

With Empowered Ageing the client is empowered to immediately retask the care worker. Worker hours do not get wasted on needless tasks. Empowered Ageing avoids frustrated clients and frustrated workers, and enables opportunities for productive and empowering care assistance.

Hiring Specialists = Better Results + Better Value

It is good practice in business to hire staff specialising in their tasks. This leads to cost efficiency as skill and commitment delivers better quality results and quicker results. Empowered Ageing enables this to be applied to home care. This is not just about cost versus results efficiencies but about the humanity of the care workers. Consider the following scenarios with respect to the worker's experience of their work.

A care worker sent into the home of an age care recipient by a traditional provider is expected to perform different tasks for different clients.

For one client they might be expected to provide transport and personal assistance. This work could consist of; drive the client up the street, wander around the shops and help carry shopping, wait while they have a haircut, sit in a coffee shop and have cuppa with the client, drive them back home, prepare a light lunch and ensure they are safely settled home.

For the next client in the same shift they are expected to provide domestic assistance. This work could include cleaning toilets, scrubbing showers, vacuuming rooms and washing up days of accumulated dishes in the kitchen.

Clearly some tasks are more pleasant to perform than others. From the worker's perspective the tasks are set by the client's care plan, and therefore unpleasant tasks become associated with the client. Attitude develops, work is affected.

For a task to be completed well it is best done by a worker happy to do it and with the appropriate skills. If you want bathrooms cleaned well, hire a cleaner. If you want a pleasant social outing up the street with a bit of shopping, take a companion who is your social peer and speaks your language. It is unreasonable to expect every worker to be well suited for every task.

Consider also how clean a bathroom would be after being "cleaned" by a worker who expected their job to consist of sitting in coffee shops. Contrast that with the results of a professional cleaning contractor. The cleaning contractor probably will be quicker and therefore cheaper as well as more thorough.

Empowered Ageing delivers more value from your care funds by enabling you to be efficient in spending your funds.