Support at Home targeted review: what providers get asked
Quality Bulletin #7-2026 opened a targeted review of selected Support at Home providers' financial and prudential obligations. What it covers, and where workforce records come into it.
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The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission set out in Quality Bulletin #7-2026 that it would begin a targeted review with selected Support at Home providers in August 2026, and start contacting those providers that month. The subject is financial and prudential obligations, and the theme running through it is pricing transparency.
If you have not been contacted, the review is still worth reading, because the Commission publishes what it finds and the common mistakes become the sector's expected standard.
A targeted review tests how well an obligation is understood across the sector
A targeted review is not triggered by a complaint. The Commission selects a group of providers and uses them to assess how well the obligations are understood across the sector. Where a provider is not complying, the Commission's stated approach is to work with them to address it. Afterwards, it reports its findings, and the report names the mistakes that came up more than once.
The practical consequence is that the output outlives the review. A provider who was never contacted is expected to have read the findings and acted on them.
Pricing has to be understandable, published, and agreed
The Commission's framing is that older people should understand and participate in decisions in their service agreement, including what services cost and how prices may change in future, and that pricing should be transparent, clearly communicated and publicly available.
Three separate obligations sit inside that. The price has to be published. It has to be explained in a way the person can engage with. And any future change has to have been part of the agreement rather than an announcement made later.
Where the workforce record enters a financial review
This is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to overreach. The targeted review is about money, and worker screening is not what it is examining.
The link is substantiation. A published price is a price for something, and that something is almost always a person of a particular type attending for a particular length of time. If your schedule distinguishes between a support worker hour and a registered nurse hour, then substantiating the charge means being able to show which one attended, and that they held the registration the price implies on the day they delivered it.
That is the point at which a financial question becomes a workforce records question. A provider who can produce a clean price list and a clean service agreement, but cannot readily evidence who delivered the visit and in what capacity, has answered half of it.
The in-home worker definition is wider than the payroll
Support at Home is delivered by a mixed workforce: direct employees, subcontractors, agency staff and platform workers, and the obligations reach anyone entering a client's home in a role connected to the delivery of funded care. We set out the detail in Support at Home worker compliance.
For a review that follows the money, the subcontracted portion is the awkward part, because the invoice comes from an organisation and the service was delivered by a person you may hold no record of.
Two questions, one record
Financial and prudential reviews and quality reviews look like separate exercises with separate owners inside a provider. They converge on the same fact: which named person delivered which service on which day, and what they were qualified and cleared to do. Answer that once, properly, and both reviews get easier.
Authoritative sources
- Aged Care Quality Bulletin #7-2026 (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission)
- Financial, prudential and governance reviews (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission)
- Targeted reviews and audits (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission)
Where a workforce bureau fits
Koora does not do pricing, service agreements or prudential reporting, and a compliance platform that claimed to would be worth distrusting on the rest of it too.
What a bureau covers is the substantiation layer underneath. Koora is one maintained record of a worker's checks that many organisations can rely on, rather than the same worker being checked from scratch by every provider they deliver for. For a Support at Home provider that means one current record per worker, including the subcontracted and agency people who hold a Career Passport, with AHPRA registration verified by Koora, screening documents checked by the compliance engine against what the role requires, and expiry tracked so a lapse surfaces rather than sitting quietly in a folder.
The reason that matters to a review about money is timing. Evidence assembled in response to a request is slower and weaker than evidence that was already current when the request arrived, and a reviewer can tell the difference.
Your team reviews in Koora, or Crew does it for you. The legal responsibility for who you engage to deliver care in a client's home stays with you. For the audit-side view of the same records, see audit-ready in aged care.
Frequently asked questions
What is a targeted review?
A review the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission initiates with a selected group of providers to assess how well the sector understands and meets a specific set of obligations, rather than a response to a complaint about one provider. It is not an audit of your whole operation. The Commission reports its findings afterwards, including common mistakes, so the output is guidance for the sector as well as a verdict on the providers reviewed.
Does the targeted review look at worker screening?
The review announced in Quality Bulletin #7-2026 is directed at financial and prudential obligations, with pricing transparency and service agreements the focus. Worker screening is not its subject. Workforce records still matter to it indirectly, because substantiating what you charged for a service means being able to show who delivered it and in what capacity.
Is CHSP being folded into Support at Home?
No. On 20 August 2026 the government confirmed the Commonwealth Home Support Programme will stay separate from Support at Home, and extended its funding to 30 June 2029. Consultation on the programme's longer term design continues. For now, providers operating across both continue to run two programmes rather than one.
This is general information, not compliance advice. Always confirm requirements with the relevant regulator, and remember that providers keep the legal responsibility to sight credentials and decide who can work.
We work hard to keep everything accurate, and our compliance engine keeps up with the rules as they change. Even so, we might get a detail slightly wrong or miss something. No one's perfect. If you think something here needs updating, email us at resources@koora.care. We would genuinely rather know, because we all do better when we help each other get it right.
See where your Aged Care team stands.
Run the free workforce audit on the records you already hold, or find your service on Koora and claim it. Your first five workers are free of passport-access charges.
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