Mr Chrisp, who is the Otago District Health Board regional general manager of planning and funding, said there was no point in people rushing for assessment because they feared they might otherwise miss out on getting residential care.
If someone needed rest-home level care, Mr Chrisp said, they would get it.
Putting pressure on the needs assessors would not be helpful for either the assessors or families.
Mr Chrisp was responding to concerns raised with the Otago Daily Times that urgent assessments for people needing rest-home care could take a month and the less urgent could take longer.
There had been no change to the normal process for first assessments, he said.
Any urgent first assessments were still seen within 24 hours and those considered less urgent should take only a few weeks.
Needs assessors were under pressure to catch up on reassessments to see if all people receiving help in their homes still needed it.
They would be providing Mr Chrisp with a report on what extra assistance they might require to complete that work.
The board was keen to make savings by reducing home-based support for the elderly which might be no longer needed.
Over the next three years it wanted to reduce its overall funding of community services for the elderly by about $6.6 million a year because it said it delivered more services than it received money for under population-based funding.
How to achieve that was under consideration.
One area with insufficient capacity was community hospital-level care beds and the board was exploring ways of encouraging existing rest-home owners, with modern facilities, to convert rest-home-level beds to hospital ones.
Mr Chrisp said this might become more attractive as rest-home use declined, but there were some staffing issues.
Moving some under 65-year-olds occupying community hospital-level beds when there might be more appropriate accommodation available was also being considered, to save costs.
