More audits sees rise of non-compliance

A near-doubling of audits of aged care homes by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission during the April-June 2022 quarter has corresponded with an increase in homes failing to meet standards.

Following disruptions of Covid and the flooding events in New South Wales and Queensland, the quality and safety commission was able to gain greater access to residential aged care homes during the quarter.

That, coupled with a greater availability of trained and registered assessors, led to a sharp increase of residential aged care audits – 316 compared to 163 the previous quarter. Similarly, the regulator made 72 directions to aged care homes regarding compliance issues, up from 50 the previous quarter.

During the fourth quarter, the commission found more residential services to be non-compliant than in each of the three previous quarters – 176 services in breach in all.

In total, 217 aged care services (residential and in-home) were found to be non-compliant against at least one quality standard.

The key areas of improvement continue to be:

• personal care and clinical care for residential aged care homes
• organisational governance and human resources as common areas across both residential care and home care services
• ongoing assessment and planning with consumers for home care services.

Between April-June 2022, the quality and safety commission issued three incident management and one restrictive practices compliance notices, 42 non-compliance notices, 18 notices to agree, and seven sanctions.

Complaints slightly down

On a more positive note, complaints fell slightly during the fourth quarter. In all, there was a total of 1,555 complaints directed at residential aged care facilities – down 128 on the previous quarter.

Medication management (261), personal and oral hygiene (242), and staffing sufficiency (239) remained the three most complained-about issues in residential care, according to the quality commissioner’s latest performance report.

Among the 1,555 residential aged care complaints:

• 855 were lodged by a family member or representative
• 409 were anonymous
• 155 other
• 136 lodged by a care recipient.

The most complaints were directed toward New South Wales aged care facilities (523), followed by Victoria (444), Queensland (297), South Australia (129), Western Australia (107), Tasmania (36), Australian Capital Territory (15), Northern Territory (4).

The commission not only recorded fewer Covid-related complaints than previous quarters (261) but, as accessibility increased, there were also fewer complaint issues related to visitor restrictions (8).

During quarter four, complaints were made against 902 residential aged care services – 557 subject to one complaint; 345 subject to more than one complaint. Services about which no complaints was made – 1,772.

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