Long before the Higher Everyday Living Fee (HELF) existed, CareApp founder Allison Nikula was trying to solve a deeply personal problem: her grandad lived in residential aged care, 800 kilometres away, and she wanted to buy him a beer.
What should have been a simple act of love was almost impossible to arrange. Plus, there was no easy way to know that he had received and enjoyed it.
Fast forward to today and conversations about HELF often skirt the point. At the other end of the packages, pricing tiers, and catalogue of extras is a real person in residential care, trying to live their life day-to-day.
What HELF has done is bring into focus a core challenge shared by both families and providers: beyond clinical care, how do we meet the genuine needs and preferences of older Australians?
More than a menu of extras
With the HELF transition period set to end on October 31 2026, it’s crunch time for providers. They’ve had the last 12 months to move all existing residents off old Extra Service Fees (ESF) and Additional Service Fees (ASF) onto HELF. It’s certainly an operational puzzle, but deciding what to offer and how to price it is only the beginning.
The real challenge starts after a resident makes a choice.
Not only do frontline teams need to know what is due, the delivery must be recorded, changes and exceptions must be managed, and leadership needs visibility across residents, services and sites.
The true test of HELF isn’t only what you offer: it’s what you can prove.
Providers should be able to answer:
- What did the resident choose?
- What were they entitled to receive?
- When was it scheduled?
- Was it delivered?
- If it was not delivered, why not?
- How does the resident, family or provider know?
This goes beyond compliance and into building transparency and trust. Making services easy to understand, choose, deliver, track and demonstrate should be the baseline. Because if HELF is managed through complicated forms, spreadsheets and disconnected processes, it risks creating more admin for teams and uncertainty for residents and their families.
Choice should feel personal, not administrative
HELF is an opportunity to support greater personalisation and quality of life by designing for choice. This could be a favourite drink, a special meal, an outing, fresh flowers, a haircut or another experience that is meaningful to the individual. Or even a beer.
Nikula’s experience inspired the earliest designs for what would eventually become CareApp Shop, created in 2021. The concept was never simply about purchasing products, but about helping residents retain choice, identity and enjoyment, while giving families a meaningful way to remain involved from a distance.
Technology should make choice easier to offer, easier to deliver and easier to see
HELF has created a formal framework around a challenge CareApp has been exploring since day one: how to make additional products, services and experiences easier to choose, coordinate, deliver and see. It was born from a genuine resident and family need, not as a last-minute response to regulatory reform.
With the resident experience, family visibility, frontline workflow and provider oversight all connected in one place, providers can:
- Present products, services, bundles and subscriptions clearly
- Record resident selections and entitlements
- Show frontline teams what is scheduled
- Capture delivery through checklists, photographs and timestamps
- Record non-delivery reasons and exceptions
- Monitor delivery across sites
- Create clear, audit-ready records, and
- Keep residents and approved family members appropriately informed.
HELF is your chance to create meaningful resident experiences
Years ago, Allison simply wanted to buy her grandad a beer. Today, providers are navigating agreements, catalogues, pricing, workflows and evidence requirements. These things matter, but they should never obscure the person they’re designed to support.
Those who deliver HELF well will be able to show what they offered or charged, as well as what was chosen, what was delivered and the difference it made.
Because some of life’s smallest extras create its most meaningful moments.
HELF is here – but additional admin doesn’t have to be. Discover how CareApp Shop can make HELF easier to choose, deliver, track and demonstrate at careapp.com.au.
