workforce
The laws of attraction
Experts warn of major workforce increases needed by 2023 .
Nicole Sutton interviewed by Eleanor Campbell
Only 3.8 per cent of Australian residential aged care homes are on track to meet the government ’ s new staffing standards set for 2023 , a new study has found .
As part of the federal response to the royal commission , providers must ensure that residents receive at least 200 minutes of care per day , with 40 minutes of care given by a registered nurse .
A registered nurse will also be required to be present on at least two daily shifts .
By comparing existing levels of staff across the country , researchers from the University of Technology Sydney found only 10 per cent of aged care homes will be able to meet the care time requirements .
Lead author Dr Nicole Sutton said that urgent workforce changes will be needed within the next two years . She joined Aged Care Insite to speak about historical staffing levels in Australia , the new standards , and the greatest obstacles facing providers leading up to 2023 .
26 agedcareinsite . com . au
ACI : Your research looked at the existing and historical staffing levels in Australian aged care . Could you tell us about that ? NS : In Australia the approved providers are regulated by the aged care act , and it specifies that providers are required to have a workforce that is sufficient in terms of being skilled and qualified enough to provide quality care .
What sufficient means in terms of numbers has never been defined at a national level . There have been minimum standards that apply for some facilities around Australia . For example , Victorian and Queensland homes that are government owned and government run are subject to their own minimum standards .
New South Wales had some requirements around registered nurses , but that was a legacy requirement that has slowly been wound back . Up until the Royal Commission , and what ’ s come since , there actually hasn ’ t been a national minimum standard in terms of the minimum number of staff that should be in an aged care home .
Is this something we ’ ve seen overseas as well ? A lot of jurisdictions , including the US and Japan , Germany , the UK , Canada , have various different standards in place . The
US brought in requirements almost two decades ago for a national standard on numbers of registered nurses on site .
Various states within the US have brought in additional requirements around how many minutes of care residents should be receiving . Likewise in Japan , they ’ ve got some standards around the minimum staffing ratio . There are minimum staffing standards in place in lots of countries around the world , though none of them particularly look the same .
Why do you think it ’ s taken so long to implement ratios ? The reluctance about bringing in standards I imagine comes from this sense that having a one-size-fits-all approach is not necessarily going to result in the best outcomes in all circumstances , because we know there ’ s such variation in the sorts of care that is provided in different kinds of aged care homes .
But the evidence shows that minimum standards are actually really important . For example , in the US we can see when a minimum standard has been brought in there has been , in general , an increase in staffing levels , and that ’ s really crucial because having adequate and sufficient , good quality staffing is one of the key drivers of quality of care .