aged care
(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

A survey of aged care providers reveals little confidence in the government’s response to the aged care royal commission’s recommendations, with a particular concern about severe staff shortages.

The survey, conducted by the Australian Aged Care Collaboration — composed of religious and some for-profit residential aged care providers — provides some predictable responses.

Greater regulation of service providers is seen as “duplicative and burdensome”, “more red tape, more compliance”. Providers are in a hurry for more money to start flowing into the sector from late next year.

But the vexed issue of the workforce is the area with the lowest confidence about successful implementation. Providers, dependent on set levels of government funding, have limited capacity to fund the significant increase in wages of aged care nurses and personal care workers everyone agrees is needed to attract and retain more workers to a sector that faces big increases in demand in coming years.

Among the responses on the workforce issue are comments like: “we are at the stage of not accepting new HCP clients in some areas”; “without staff no amount of increased HCP (home care package) funding will support our ageing population”; “I just cannot stress enough the need to attract staff to the aged care workforce”.

The survey is critical of the government for failing to join the union case for a significant rise in wages that has been before the Fair Work Commission for over a year without material progress — there won’t even be any hearings until mid-2022.

Much of the delay has been caused by a lack of information about employees, with extensive discussion between the unions and the government over worker classifications and census data that could be used to inform the case.

The overall result is that aged care’s biggest problem, its workforce, continues to plague the sector as paper circulates between lawyers about the one thing everyone says is needed to address the problem: higher pay.