A licensed program of last-resort debt resolution that reduces downstream cost to the health and welfare systems.

The problem

Palliative-care social workers spend clinical hours on debt problems they are not licensed to solve. Community legal centres carry six-month waiting lists for consumer-credit matters. Financial counsellors advise but cannot mediate under the credit licence framework.

The cost of this gap is absorbed inside the health and welfare systems — not by the creditors who profit from the underlying products.

Meanwhile, the small population of households at end of life with unresolved consumer debt is a well-defined target group with a well-defined intervention window.

What LWD does about it

LWD proposes a program-of-last-resort structure that governments and health departments can commission or endorse: a licensed, independently-governed, and publicly-audited service that takes referrals from the health system and resolves the debt problem professionally.

The mediation is licensed. The reporting is public. The eligibility criteria are documented. And because Credit Mediation Services Pty Ltd holds the credit licence — not LWD, and not government — the regulatory posture is clean.

This is not a grant application. It is a case for structural inclusion of the program in the health-and-ageing system's referral pathways.

A case in one paragraph

Composite: a palliative-care social worker in metropolitan Sydney reports 3 to 5 hours per fortnight absorbed by debt-related distress that she has no professional standing to resolve. Under a Room D pathway, those hours return to clinical work; the household is referred to the LWD-funded licensed program; and the debt problem is handled by practitioners who are licensed to handle it. Composite illustration · labelled · consultation basis

Why this is a system-level fit

• It sits inside the regulatory geometry that already exists: the NCCP Act framework, ACNC public-benevolent-institution registration, and ASIC ACL supervision. Nothing new needs to be legislated.
• It reduces measurable downstream cost across health, community legal, and financial-counselling systems.
• It creates a public reporting cadence that the sector currently does not have — case counts, creditor-response ratios, and cost-per-mediation-hour, published quarterly.