Data on residential aged care quality

This is a submission to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety.  To identify the causes of any systemic failures, and to recommend actions in response, the Commission will need analyses of all the relevant data available.

Numbers of notices of non-compliance dropped sharply after 2009, and rose sharply after 2016.  Sanctions gradually declined from 2003 to 2016, then rose sharply.  We think these changes reflect major changes in the decision-making of Commonwealth government agencies, rather than real changes in quality.

For-profit providers had had non-compliance risks about 1.70 times those of not-for-profit providers, sanction risks about 2.78 times, and complaint numbers about 1.77 times.

There are no reliable comparable data on aged care quality.  Consumer experience reports may partly fill this gap. We show that 20% samples give very unreliable results, and recommend 80% sampling.

Financial data on each aged care provider would help analyse links between quality failures and staffing expenditures.