Improving the quality of residential aged care

Consumer experience reports show more positive responses in not-for-profit, non-metropolitan and smaller homes.  Higher staff numbers, including volunteers, may be partly responsible for these differences.

Newly-introduced quality of care measures are labour-intensive, vulnerable to fraud, and of limited value for care or research.  Quality data should be collected by sensors and centrally recorded.  Privacy concerns have to be met, but should not protect low-quality providers.

Providers are not required to report financial data in standard form, making it impossible to know their profitability and capital adequacy in aggregate.   Data for some providers are not publicly available.

For-profit providers had debts that were 5 times their net assets at 30 June 2014, and 9.7 times at 30 June 2018.  These high debt ratios make it increasing likely that a large provider will fail. The Department of Health should be responsible for prompt repayment of accommodation deposits.