Access to Local Government HACC services for people speaking a language other than English at home

Abstract

Home and Community Care (HACC) services are provided to frail older people, other people with disabilities, and their carers, to assist independent living. HACC policy acknowledges that certain groups within the population have greater difficulty accessing HACC services than others. This paper considers the equity of access issue for one of the groups that have difficulty - people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. Language spoken at home is used as an indicator of CALD status. The 2001 Census data and HACC-user data from the Western Metropolitan Region (WMR) of Victoria was analysed. The proportion of the HACC user population that speaks a language other than English (LOTE) was compared with the proportion of the general population that speaks a language other than English for two age groups ?the total population and those 65 years and over. Chi square analyses were conducted to determine odds ratios to give an indication of the magnitude and direction of the association between CALD status and access to HACC services. Analyses indicated that people who spoke a LOTE at home were approximately a third as likely to access Local Government HACC services than those who spoke English (OR=0.35). The findings suggest that policy and service development initiatives to improve access to HACC services for people of CALD backgrounds have not yet effectively reached their targets.