The (mis)matching of resources and assessed need in remote Aboriginal community aged care

© 2014 The Authors. Australasian Journal on Ageing published by Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd on behalf of Australian Council on the Ageing and The Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.Aim: To examine processes of aged-care needs assessment for Aboriginal people in remote central Australia to assist development of appropriate models of aged care. Method: A qualitative study involving 11 semistructured interviews with aged-care assessors and two focus groups with Aboriginal community members. Results: This paper reports four major themes concerning how needs assessments relate to realities of service delivery: cultural perspectives on aged care, context of service delivery, equity and access to services, and program (mis)alignments. Conclusion: Disparities exist between assessment recommendations and service availability, with a potential mismatch between Aboriginal understandings of needs, interpretations by individual assessment staff and program guidelines. Incorporating a conceptual framework, such as the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, into service guidelines to ensure structured consideration of a person’s holistic needs may assist, as will building the capacity of communities to provide the level and type of services required