‘Room for improvement’

According to a new initiative the sector would benefit from collecting greater sector-wide data sets for its own use to further enhance an aged care scorecard.

The recommendation comes within the first-ever Aged Care Effectiveness Index, a detailed report that calculates and assesses the performance and efficacy of residential aged care across the country in the areas of financial sustainability, quality, resourcing and consumer satisfaction.

The new initiative – developed and launched by aged care consulting company Mirus Australia in collaboration with aged care benchmarking firm StewartBrown – presents a clear argument for the sector to give thought to the collection of data to support the index.

Examples for consideration proposed in the report include:

• gaps in financial data such as forecasting
• better use of existing quality data
• broadening the resourcing component of the index beyond minimum staffing requirements into factors that characterise effectiveness
• expanding consumer experience data to be sector-wide and more frequent.

The need for “greater robust data sets” is key to monitoring the sector, managing partner at StewartBrown, Stuart Hutcheon told Australian Ageing Agenda.

“Financial sustainability will continue to be an area of great concern, as the reforms provide confidence in returning the sector to a financial sustainable position, however there will be at least a three-year transition period,” said Mr Hutcheon.

“Therefore, financial concerns will remain in the short term and there is still work to be done with the reforms including a focus on regional and remote areas.”

Mr Hutcheon said that resourcing was a “significant concern” and meeting the mandated minutes, maintaining staffing levels, staff recruitment, retention, training and reducing agency costs will “continue to be of great concern” in both the short and long term.

He added the need to build more residential aged beds in the sector over the next 5-10 years and the time required to do this is also one of their biggest concerns.

“The index confirmed the critical areas of concern, which include financial, resourcing and capacity,” Mr Hutcheon said.

When considering what the sector could be doing over the coming year, Mr Hutcheon told AAA that structuring the future capacity required in the sector, such as new beds, is reliant on “forecasted financial returns” and the ability of the sector to “adapt to the funding reforms, mandated care minutes and navigating the changes” to the residential accommodation pricing.

“The sector needs to contribute further financial data to allow analysis and financial forecasting of the reforms which will determine the financial impact of reforms on the financial sustainability of the sector,” he said.

Mirus Australia chief executive officer Andrew Farmer agreed with Mr Hutcheon. He told AAA that his “biggest concern” is that the sector does “not have enough of its own data” to completely answer the question about effectiveness.

“The index we have created is a starting point for the sector to rate itself and continue to develop this concept of an effective sector, but more data will be required,” Mr Farmer said.

Each of the four sections of the ACE Index – available for download from Mirus Australia’s website –includes a score out of 10:

• financial sustainability – 6
• quality – 7
• resourcing requirements – 6
• consumer satisfaction – 8.

Mr Farmer said the design of the ACE Index reflects broad industry sentiment and insights, rather than applying weighted formulas to the data at this stage.

“We believe that overemphasising formulaic analysis might shift attention from the insights and action the report aims to inspire,” he said.

“The Index is based on comprehensive industry consultation and is supported by polling, providing a clear view of where alignment exists between sector sentiment and actual scores. Our goal is for this data to prompt meaningful reflection within the sector.”

Mr Farmer calls for providers to consider questions such as:

• Do we agree with the ratings and understand the reasons behind them?
• How does our organisation measure up against each component?
• Are we contributing to sector-wide improvement, or are there areas where we might be holding back progress?

“We hope these reflections, along with continued data collection across the sector, will enhance the quality and impact of the ACE Index over time, supporting us all in striving for greater effectiveness,” he said.

Drawing on analysed data from over 90,000 residential aged care beds and insights from Mirus Australia and StewartBrown’s renowned sector expertise, the ACE Index offers a long-term benchmarking tool for stakeholders to track performance, identify gaps, and mould the future of aged care.

Segmentation of data

Another key finding was that despite providing the same services to a demographic that is similar, the sector is not equal and the extensive policy frameworks, funding models, and even regulations, show up very differently across the sector.

Some of the distinguishing factors include:

• location
• demographic/minority community served
• mission or purpose
• maturity of the facility
• business
• size of the organisation

Mr Farmer said the issue was “not all providers are the same” and some of the distinctions of efficacy will have different contexts for different segments.

“These segments include size, location, purpose and even maturity as some sites are very new and some have been trading for a very long time,” he said. “We intend to break down the index into some segments in future reports.”

Mr Hutcheon suggests the sector focus on the actions it can control.

“Occupancy is continuing to rise with increased demand which will support better financial outcomes, however providers must also ensure they are maximising the recovery of care and accommodation costs by managing their funding, their accommodation revenue – pricing – and their cost of capital,” he said.

“Providers should continue to focus on the four key areas of financial, quality, resourcing, and consumer satisfaction. Implementing systems to collect the important data relating to these areas and contribute this data to the sector to allow further analysis and reporting.”

The new Aged Care Act and the new standards will have a significant impact on the sector over several years, Mr Farmer told AAA.

“The sector will continue to deal with a great deal of change as the reform agenda continues to be implemented,” he said.

“We hope to engage leaders in the sector to help us guide the future index reports and encourage all providers to participate in gathering more data to support the index in future.”

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