The small team of volunteers at Lithgow's Meals on Wheels work hard creating hot meals five days a week and delivering frozen meals for seven.

For three years Levente Boda has been Lithgow's Meals on Wheels manager and he said that it was a very 'rewarding' job.

"We deliver to Portland, Wallerawang, Clarence, Hartley and all over the LGA, we are slightly limited to delivering to remote areas since there is only a small number of volunteers," he said.

"We have around eight regular volunteers and two or three people each day deliver the meals."

LINC's full services coordinator Sharon said that the volunteers were the real heroes and without them they wouldn't have a service.

"We need these volunteers otherwise we wouldn't be able to run these services, but without the clients we wouldn't have a service.

According to Sharon ever since COVID hit, more people in the Lithgow community have reached out to meals on wheels.

"Since a lot of residents day trips had to be cancelled and they couldn't get out as often we found ourselves overwhelmed with more applicants, but it is great," she said.

Sharon had so much praise for the cooking staff at LINC who put a lot of effort into the meals.

"They are delicious, they sell out quite fast some of them," she said.

"At the moment our frozen meals are extremely popular and they are great for people that might not be home when we deliver our hot meals, though, they are very popular too."

Sharon said she just wanted to thank the community for getting behind Meals on Wheels and for her volunteers, as it couldn't run without them.

All the meals are made on site at LINC, but there are a small amount of diet meals they purchase because the cost of making special meals is high.

"We shop local, so we get a fair bit of food from Blackheath Veggies, we just try and keep it as local as we can," Mr Boda said.

Mr Boda said they rarely get any complaints due to the amount of planning that goes into the meals.

"We may get the odd complaint about not liking a certain food, like fish for example, but it is very rare that we get complaints, a lot of planning goes into how we pack and label the food and how it is cooked," he said.

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To sign up to get the meals, you have to be over the age of 65 and go through My Aged Care services to get registered. Once registered My Aged Care will send Lithgow a referral, before one of their staff members will have a face to face visit with the client to help take them through their individual choices.

"If someone is in big need over 65 and they don't have My Aged Care then we can do emergency meal assistance, and then go through the My Aged Care process afterwards, so if you are unable to cook give us a call and we can sort something out," he said.

The process can take up to two weeks to be referred when going through My Aged Care.

"We are in contact with the local hospital to make plans in advance for patients that may have had a stroke so that we can deliver as soon as they return home," he said.

Mr Boda said it was disappointing for the team to find out their organisation would not be receiving a funding boost.

In the media release announcing a "funding boost" set to benefit Meals on Wheels across Australia dated May, 18 2021 with the headline 'Nod to volunteers as meal providers receive a funding boost' Senator the Hon Richard Colbeck, Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services, said "This vital measure puts the health and wellbeing of older Australians first, while strengthening the viability of meal providers across the country".

Meals on Wheels services in NSW, despite catering for 40 per cent of Meals on Wheels clients nationally, are not set to gain from this "funding boost" announcement.

"We need clarity from Government that funding for Meals on Wheels services in NSW is not going to drop to a lower funding level of $7.50 in 2022 as this will have serious consequences for older Australians living in NSW and for our organisation," Les MacDonald, CEO of Meals on Wheels NSW, peak body representing the Meals on Wheels services in NSW said.

Mr Boda said that early on in the pandemic Meals on Wheels did receive assistance; a subsidy delivery cost.

"Since volunteers were unable to deliver food due to lockdown we had to pay staff, so we got extra funding at the time for delivery, but as far as I know we haven't been given any special assistance since," he said.

"Getting direct funding towards meals is a priority since meat and veg prices have gone up, and currently we can use our volunteer staff again but if restrictions were to go up by one level and we couldn't use them then the additional costs would be unmanageable.

"From the top of my head we try and keep prices low, so it is $8 for a main meal of reasonable size, but the cost of some ingredients are going up fast, and while it is not our priority to be making a lot of money from this, if we don't have funding and the prices keep rising then we can't support it and we have to either take it off the menu or put the cost back on the client which we never want to do."

If you need assistance with meals contact Sharon on 6354 5911 or LINC on 6352 2077.

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