How Meltwater helped us navigate Australia's biggest Aged Care shake-up in decades
On November 1 2025, Australia launched the Support at Home program - the most significant restructure of its aged care system in a generation. The reform changed how older Australians access, fund, and manage in-home care services. For providers like Dovida - Australia's fourth-largest home care organisation, supporting 12,000 older Australians nationally - the stakes were high.
Clients were confused. Families were anxious. And the sector had months, not years, to respond.
We turned to Meltwater to understand how the public conversation was evolving in real time.
Using Explore, we built a search tracking media coverage of the reform from October 2025 onwards. The dominant themes clustering around the conversation were confusion about changes, concern over costs, and uncertainty about what the reform meant for existing care arrangements.
We used the MIRA Studio to synthesise these insights into a structured weekly report. That report became the backbone of four distinct communications streams:
- weekly social media content tailored to address the specific concerns appearing in that week's coverage
- a weekly insights report distributed to our 40 national office managers, ensuring our frontline people understood the environment our clients were navigating. This information also prepared them on the pain points their client leads were facing ahead of their consultations
- a monthly all-staff content agenda that kept our team aligned on the public narrative; and
- monthly executive briefing that kept our leadership team ahead of emerging issues;
The impact was obvious. By consistently addressing the concerns surfacing in media coverage - rather than defaulting to generic reassurance messaging - Dovida built a reputation for genuinely understanding the reform.
That responsiveness translated directly into client acquisition: a number of older Australians and their families came to us after feeling their existing provider wasn't across the changes. In a competitive market, being the organisation that spoke plainly to people's real concerns made a measurable difference.
Meltwater didn't just tell us what people were saying. It helped us decide what to say back - and when.
