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About the presenter
Dr Danelle Kenny is a research and policy officer in the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, working on regulatory strategy for the Support at Home Program. She conferred her PhD in 2025, presenting the first application of behavioural economic theory to the evaluation of resource-allocation under consumer directed care in the Australian home care package program.
As a researcher with UQs Centre for Health Services Research, Danelle has undertaken a wide variety of research activities focused on economic evaluation of health services and systems, including consultation on the National Quality Indicator Program, feasibility and cost benefit analysis of standardised reporting systems as a National minimum data set, as well as teaching and tutoring in health systems analysis, health policy, and health economics.
Danelle has a passion and strength in monitoring and evaluation of health services from an economic perspective, with particular focus on stakeholder engagement and improving quality of care for people living with dementia. Concurrently with her PhD studies, she successfully project managed the MRFF funded COM-IC project, completed in 2024, which developed and released Australia’s first core outcome set to improve the quality of dementia care in routine care settings.
About the seminar
Populations are ageing, people are living longer and there is a high level of desirability for all sectors to maintain health and quality of life over the life course. Increasingly, there is demand and mutual benefit for people to receive these services in their homes, to ‘age in place’. Home-based health care services are purported to reduce hospitalisations and transfer to institutional care, as well as being preferred by older people. Despite these claims, there is limited evidence describing how home health care resources are distributed and what effects home health care services have on outcomes in aged care. In an environment of resource scarcity, consideration of resource allocation efficiency is imperative. This is particularly relevant to the Australian context, where policy centres on an older person’s right to choose. When affording this right, policy-makers need to consider how home care recipients can be supported to make decisions consistent with their long-term goal of ageing in place. Behavioural Economic theory suggests human decision-making processes sometimes follow heuristics, or rules of thumb, rather than a carefully considered assessment following logical processes, and that these heuristics can be leveraged to support decision-making. In order to use these tools, we need to understand which services or service-mix are most likely to meet an older person’s care needs – i.e. which way to nudge?
Using interRAI data from Canada’s home care program, my research explores the impact of service type and intensity on length of stay and transfer to long-term care from long-stay home care from 2010-2018 across Canada. The objective is to identify services that optimise home-care duration, keeping people healthy in the community, and delaying transfer to residential aged care.
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