New online resource for care quality monitoring
A new online resource to help track and understand the quality of care across different care domains is available for aged care providers, researchers, government bodies and families.
The Australian Consortium for Aged Care has launched a free and accessible online resource to support the measurement and evaluation of quality of care experienced by older people.
Called the Quality Indicator Repository, it is the result of a three-year research project funded by the Medical Research Future Fund and led by the Registry of Senior Australians Research Centre based at South Australia Health and Medical Research Institute, and the Caring Futures Institute at Flinders University.
The repository is designed to help aged care providers, researchers, government bodies and families of older Australians better understand and track care quality.
“The release of the ACAC Quality Indicator Repository is an important step in addressing longstanding calls for an evidence-based framework to measure and improve the experiences of older Australians,” said ROSA director Associate Professor Maria Inacio.
The consortium, which launched in 2021, and this project is a joint effort involving researchers from ROSA, Flinders University, Macquarie University, the University of Queensland, the University of South Australia, the University of New South Wales, and the Australian Dementia Network Registry while Digital agency Mango Chutney developed the repository’s online platform.
Quality indicators monitor the safety, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, person-centredness and timeliness of care, and Dr Inacio said while current health and aged care reform aim to improve service delivery, evaluation remains critical, and reforms require efforts to monitor and assess their impact.
She said the repository showed the breadth of available measures, their characteristics and how they could be applied to undertake evaluations.
The repository was created with a series of scoping literature reviews between 2022 and 2025 conducted by ACAC that identified indicators across eight key settings where older people receive care, including:
- residential aged care
- home care
- palliative care
- care transitions
- dementia care
- rural and remote care
- rehabilitation care
- primary care
- hospital care
The first of the literature reviews – which examined quality indicators for care transitions – was published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association and identified 361 quality indicators from 89 programs across 12 countries.
The indicators measured outcomes or processes and represented the dimensions of patient centeredness, timeliness, and effectiveness, efficiency and safety.
The repository currently includes 1,326 quality indicators across six care settings and more will be added in late 2025. ACAC will also collaborate with clinical, consumer, industry, and academic experts to refine the repository in the future and will develop a national framework for high quality care.
The repository is available here.
Comment on the story below. Follow Australian Ageing Agenda on LinkedIn and Facebook, sign up to our twice-weekly newsletter and subscribe to AAA magazine for the complete aged care picture.
