Aged Care Insite Issue 94 | April-May 2016 | Seite 20

industry & policy

Funds must go farther

A

Rural and
remote
service
providers are
overdue for
increased
support
in order
to remain
operational.
Patrick Reid
interviewed by
Dallas Bastian

delegation of Leading Age Services Australia’s
(LASA) rural members has called on the rural
health minister, Senator Fiona Nash, and her
parliamentary colleagues, to take swift action ensuring
the viability of rural and remote aged services.
LASA officials met with Nash and a number of federal
MPs following the recent release of an Aged Care
Financing Authority (ACFA) report titled Financial Issues
Affecting Rural and Remote Providers, which found
providers operating in those areas face extra financial
challenges and generally have higher cost pressures
and worse financial results.
LASA chief executive Patrick Reid, who is due to
step down in June, says the delegation’s goal at the
meetings was ensuring that the report was acted
upon, rather than quietly shelved.
Reid tells Aged Care Insite: “It is a stark reality that
the average rural and remote aged-care facility has
[earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and
amortisation] of -$2004 per resident a year, compared
with +$8840 in non-rural and remote areas.”
Here, Reid expands on these concerns and discusses
the kind of action he hopes the report will spur.

ACI: can you give us some context about efforts in
this space?
pr: The main thing is that, since 2011, LASA has been
lobbying quite strongly around the issues for rural
providers. Of course, we see no joy from the ACFA
report concerning the items that were being lobbied on
for that length of time. However, with the verification
of the issues that rural providers do face, it’s time for
government to act on rectifying them and committing
to helping rural communities.

lasa says the report confirms that age services
providers in rural and remote areas face higher
costs in most areas of operation than their
counterparts in cities. What were some of the key
cost comparisons?
We know that care-management costs are nearly four
times higher in rural and remote facilities. Registered,
enrolled nurse costs are double. Labour and maintenance
costs are almost triple.
18 agedcareinsite.com.au

When you’re looking at things like just allied health, or
even getting the local [electrician] or the local plumber,
they are facing double, triple, quadruple the cost of their
city cousins. It does make operations difficult. Much of the
funding they do receive is cookie-cutter – it’s the same as
what people in metropolitan areas get. It makes keeping
the system or the operation viable difficult.
You add on top of that some of the other
pressures around attracting and recruiting a retaining
workforce; and all these other things – it just adds up
to a difficult environment.
What we do know, and it was confirmed yesterday
when we visited 15 or 16 different parliamentarians, is
that people do want to stay in those communities. They
don’t want to move to regional or metropolitan centres.
They want to retire. They want to live well in their
communities, to stay there to receive services such as
home care and residential care. That was one of the
key takeaways, that many of these services do need to
remain in their community.
They need to be viable, they need to operate
effectively but they also need more effective
management of their income through more targeted
and defined funding from the Commonwealth.

You’re calling on the government to take immediate
action to address these findings. What would you
like to see done?
There are a few things. We now have the report.
This isn’t anything new, as I’ve said. For five or six
years, we’ve been harping on these issues. It’s time
for action.
The focus of the meetings, for our delegation, was
making sure that those who do control this type of
action are aware that his report [mustn’t] become
shelf-ware. It can’t gather dust. They have all the
evidence they need now to act.
[We need answers to questions like] how do we better
target things such as the viability supplement and how
do we ensure there are grants for capital works to make
certain that much of the infrastructure ageing in those
communities is fit for purpose for the care of older
Australians. We have to ensure that there is some equity in
terms of funding for rural and remote communities. n