Spending on personal care for elderly people living in their own homes increased on average by $98 a day over 11 months, while rest-home care costs dropped by $762 daily, the Otago District Health Board will be told today.
Chief executive Brian Rousseau's report to the board's monthly meeting contains charts of trends for the 11 months to the end of May this year showing a decline in use of most community services for the elderly, apart from personal care.
He pointed out the analysis of personal care and rest-home costs was "somewhat superficial" as it did not identify whether there were other costs being borne within the system for the falling rest-home use.
An analysis that would look at Dunedin Hospital presentations and admissions was still to be carried out.
The board has been trying to reduce spending on community care for the elderly, an area where it estimates it is over supplying services by about $10 million a year, compared with national averages.
It has set targets for reducing personal care and housework support.
The charts in Mr Rousseau's report show, however, that while the housework support hours are dropping as planned, personal care hours have increased from about 16,400 hours in July last year to about 17,400 in May this year.
The target was for the number of personal care hours to be reduced so that December's allocation was 95 hours lower than June's.
In that same time, the target for housework support hours was for a drop of more than 3500 hours.
Between July last year and May, the number of people in rest-home care in Otago fell by almost 100 from 860 to 763.
The board eventually wants the number of people in this type of care to be 600 and has acknowledged that it will need to increase services in the community as a result, meaning that it cannot expect to reduce its spending by more than $6.6 million a year.
The board spends almost $80 million a year on services to the elderly.
For most of past year the number of people in hospital level care beds has been about 480.
