Is Consumer Directed Care a direction for Australia?

“Consumer directed care ” is such an empowering term, how could we question whether it is a direction that Australia should take? But as the term is not well known in Australia, we need to establish just what it means before we head in another new direction, and indeed ask whether we have gone there before under another signpost. These questions were addressed in a session on Consumer Directed Care (CDC) at the International Association of Gerontology World Congress held in Vancouver in mid 2001, and papers presented at that session provided the starting point for this paper. Fuller accounts of the development and current status of consumer direction in the US by two of the speakers at the IAG session, Robyn Stone and Jane Tilly, and others, can be found in the references listed at the end of this paper. In particular, the special issue of the journal Generations on Consumer Direction in Long Term Care, published in Fall 2000, gave a wide-ranging account of the state of play at that time and emerging directions of development. The aims of this paper are threefold: 1. to review the meaning and development of CDC in overseas programs, and especially t