Sustainable high quality aged care

Major threats to sustainable aged care include poor quality measurements, poor assessment processes, uncontrolled financial reporting and provider failures.

We have proposed that automatically monitored care data be transmitted to a central agency and the provider, together with automatically-generated messages to the provider where help to a person seems needed.  The Department of Health should lead research on automatic monitoring and data analysis, bearing the development costs, and paying providers to instal equipment.  

Activity based funding arrangements have the potential to provide fair stable funding.  But the 2019 AN-ACC proposal is complex, inadequately based, and may disadvantage persons with dementia or obesity.  

Standardised reporting, and restrictions on provider structures and related party transactions, are needed to prevent under-reporting of profits.  Profits and capital adequacy should be publicly reported each quarter.

Increased supply of home care, and more stringent quality and financial prudential requirements, may result in more failures of residential care providers.  Better support of regional providers is needed, together with plans to deal with large provider failures.