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Volunteers contribute extensively across Australia’s care and support sectors including aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care.
Volunteering Australia has made two submissions providing recommendations and highlighting the significant role volunteers play in the care and support sectors.
- Submission on the Care and Support Sector Code of Conduct
- Submission on Aligning Regulation across the Care and Support Sector
While data illustrates the scale of volunteer involvement, the collection of data on volunteers in the care and support sectors is limited, and inconsistent across sectors. Efforts to ensure that volunteers are consistently included in data collection efforts in the sector will be crucial to an evidence-based approach to the alignment of regulation.
Despite their extensive involvement in aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care, whether and how volunteers are included under relevant regulation varies across the three sectors.
Volunteering Australia suggests that volunteers should be considered in workforce definitions as an essential, but distinct, component of the care and support workforce. Despite their contributions to the sector, volunteers are different from paid staff in their role types, obligations, and work expectations.
Submission on the Care and Support Sector Code of Conduct
This submission highlights issues concerning the inclusion of volunteers in the proposed code of conduct for the care and support sector, and the strain its obligations may place on the human resources and governance arrangements of volunteer involving organisations.
Volunteers add value to care and support programs in the aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care sectors, and contribute to providing high quality care and social support functions for consumers and participants. Ensuring that this contribution is viable, safe, and sustainable should therefore be a central aim of efforts to align regulation across sectors, including the proposed code
of conduct.
In the submission, Volunteering Australia makes the following recommendations:
- Clarify the inclusion of volunteers in veterans’ care under the proposed code of conduct.
- Provide additional support and resourcing to volunteer involving organisations to ensure that they are able to meet their obligations under the code of conduct.
- Engage in ongoing consultation with relevant bodies, including the state and territory peak volunteering bodies and major providers which involve volunteers, on how future regulatory alignments would affect volunteer engagement.
Submission on Aligning Regulation across the Care and Support Sector
This submission provides input on the Australian Government’s efforts to align regulation across the aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care sectors. It identifies the ways that volunteer engagement in the aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care sectors is affected by the current regulatory environment, and how it may be affected by alignments across sectors. It aims to identify opportunities to reduce red tape and encourage the safe and effective engagement of volunteers, and to highlight the risks of regulatory alignment for volunteer involvement in the care and support sector.
In the submission, Volunteering Australia makes the following recommendations:
- Clarify the inclusion of volunteers in the alignment of regulation across the aged care, disability support, and veterans’ care sectors.
- Consider how the development and implementation of regulatory alignments would affect volunteer engagement and consider whether volunteers should be either included in or exempt from particular regulatory requirements. This should follow detailed analysis and engagement with the volunteering ecosystem.
- Engage in ongoing consultation with relevant bodies, including the state and territory peak volunteering bodies and major providers which involve volunteers, on how future regulatory alignments would affect volunteer engagement.
What’s next?
Volunteering Australia will continue to engage with the ongoing consultation process on aligning regulation in the care and support sector. This will include providing submissions on specific areas of regulatory change which affect volunteering, such as the development of a Care and Support Worker Screening Check.
