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Use of HACC Services by People Born in Non-English Speaking Countries

Overview

This is a report on the extent to which older people from non-English speaking backgrounds were using Home and Community Care (HACC) services in 2008-09 and 2009-2010 in Victoria, Australia. It consists of tables and accompanying graphs describing all local government areas (LGAs) where 10% or more of the population aged 70-plus is from a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) background, or where the CALD population aged 70-plus comprises 300 or more people in the LGA.

There are summary tables and graphs for the whole of Victoria and for the eight Department of Health regions.

Birthplace groups

The population of people aged 70-plus in each LGA has been divided into three groups according to birthplace:

English-speaking countries (ESC)
The nine non-English speaking countries with the largest populations in that LGA
Other non-English speaking countries.

The main English-speaking countries are Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Ireland and the United States of America. Also included in ESC are a number of smaller countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

HACC service groupings

The 12 activity types (or service types) provided by agencies under the HACC Program have been grouped into three:

Home support group (Domestic Assistance, Personal Care, Assessment, Case Management, Property Maintenance, Delivered Meals, Respite)
Allied Health and Nursing services
Social support services (Planned Activity Group, Volunteer Social Support)

Services are described in two ways:

Total hours to people born in this particular country
Number of people born in this particular country who received this service.

Quantities of service are counted as hours per annum. Five meals have been counted as one hour, in order to produce comparable data. Counselling was excluded due to poor quality data. The number of clients receiving a given type of service is shown. It should be noted that a single client may receive more than one service type; thus the tables do not show an unduplicated count of clients across all service types.

Method used for selecting the ‘top 10’ countries

Calculate the ‘top ten’ NES countries separately for each LGA.
Rank the top ten countries in each LGA by their Census 70+ population, after grouping all English-speaking countries into one group, ESC.
Use this listing to decide which countries to include in each of the 3 service groupings. Put the countries that do not appear in the top ten into Other Non ESC.

Example:

Suppose Country X does not appear in the top 10 Census list (but is lumped into the Census ‘Other NESC’ cell).
Suppose Country X has 1,000 HACC clients in the Home Support grouping in this particular LGA, which is more than the lowest-ranked country in the Census top 10 list.
In this case, put these 1,000 HACC clients in the ‘Other NESC’ cell in the HACC Client column.
Conversely, suppose Country Y appears in the Census Top 10, but the LGA has no HACC clients born in Country Y. Then Country Y will be missing from the 3 service groupings, but will still appear in the Census column.

How to read the tables

Service Group	Rank	Country of Birth	HACC 70+ Clients	Service Hours	Average Hours per Client	Census Population 70 Plus	Coverage: Clients as % of Population
Home Support Group	1	ESC	4,417	141,280	32.0	17,349	25.5%
	2	Italy	326	8,079	24.8	838	38.9%
	3	Netherlands	286	6,455	22.6	551	51.9%
	4	Germany	134	4,084	30.5	510	26.3%
	5	Croatia	200	4,211	21.1	362	55.2%
	6	Poland	103	2,042	19.8	321	32.1%
	7	Ukraine	82	1,898	23.1	173	47.4%
	8	Greece	58	1,540	26.5	143	40.6%
	9	Macedonia	95	1,098	11.6	127	74.8%
	10	Hungary	28	957	34.2	107	26.2%
	11	Other non ESC	311	8,243	26.5	1,164	26.7%
Home Support Group			6,040	179,894	29.8	21,645	27.9%

Consider the example above.

Italy has the largest 70-plus Census population as a non English speaking country with 838 people (ranking 2 after English Speaking Countries). Of these 838 people, 326 are HACC clients aged 70-plus. These 326 clients received 8,079 hours of services in the Home Support grouping, therefore average hours per client were 24.8. The coverage (clients as % of population) is calculated by dividing the HACC 70-plus Clients by the Census 70-plus Population (326/838=38.9%).

Data sources

Census 2006 population data (Place of Usual Residence Count)
HACC Minimum Data Set 2008-09 and 2009-10.

Records with missing data on birthplace were excluded. The HACC MDS contains a statistical linkage key (SLK), which enables the analyst to link all records pertaining to the same individual without identifying the person. A small number of HACC records were excluded because they had incomplete data on the SLK.

The report was prepared by Sharon Lau, Frances Lentini and Vilas Sawrikar in the Aged Care Branch of Victoria’s Department of Health.