A survey by aged care accountants has revealed that more than half of the aged care facilities studied are operating at a loss.
In the three months to September 2019, 51 per cent of aged care facilities recorded an operating loss before tax, according to the latest quarterly survey by accountants StewartBrown.
For the same period in 2018, only 41 per cent of homes were operating at a loss.
The results are even worse for facilities in outer regional and remote areas, where 65 per cent operated at a loss, compared with 47 per cent in cities.
The survey looked at 984 residential aged care facilities, which represents 41 per cent of total facilities in Australia.
Aged care operators are experiencing greater losses in the provision of care.
“The single biggest issue in relation to residential care is the unsustainable financial losses attributed to the provision of care,” the StewartBrown report states.
The cost of delivering care (government subsidies + consumer contributions – the cost of providing care) is now accruing an average loss of $13.96 per resident per day. The loss is even greater in rural and remote locations, at an average deficit of $28.31 per resident per day.
(Care costs include care staff costs, medical supplies, catering, cleaning, laundry, routine maintenance, administration, quality, training, compliance, human resources, local administration and corporate administration.)
As a result of the deficit, operators are having to use a surplus from their accommodation operations to “support” the care loss.
“This will greatly inhibit building upgrades and erode investment into new aged care homes,” the report states.
Aged and Community Services (ACSA) released a statement in response to the StewartBrown report calling for “urgent” support for aged care operators facing a “bleak” financial situation.
ACSA CEO, Pat Sparrow, said, “More than half of aged care homes are struggling to remain viable – that’s something we need to fix urgently if we want to avoid closures and maintain proper aged care services.”
The financial performance of in-home care improved during the September 2019 quarter, due mainly to lower staff costs.
“Whether this is sustainable is open to conjecture,” the report states.
Unspent home care funds continued to rise, reaching $7,295 per client or almost $800 million in total.
“The biggest single issue in relation to home care packages in our opinion remain… unspent funds,” the StewartBrown report states.
“We view with concern the prospect of continued growth in unspent funds, and many probable instances of their use for capital-related expenditure for care recipients,” the StewartBrown report states.
Government plans to implement a ‘payment in arrears’ model to address the unspent funds problem is “essential”, the StewartBrown report states.
The “worrying” StewartBrown analysis comes on the heels of recent home care data showing that 112,237 people are still on the waiting list for their approved level of home care.
Ms Sparrow said, “The measure currently being considered by government to manage unspent funds could help meet demand and reduce unacceptable waiting times by providing additional high-level packages to older Australians.”
Occupancy levels dropped significantly for the first time, from 94.9 per cent in the September quarter 2018 to 93.9 per cent for the December quarter 2019.
I care for my mum in a granny flat we had purpose built to see her through her old age at home. I naively believed because of mums needs and she was on level 2 with level 3 home care package approved we would have the ability to provide decent care for mum. We have been waiting 2 years for the approved level 3 payment and I’m now applying for level 4 as mums needs have significantly increased in the past two years. We have been classified as 1-3 month wait for the past 4 months, I rang MAC to find out when, only to be told mum would need a reassessment, she was only reassessed last October as still applicable for a level 3 package. They don’t care that a single family carer who works and has other care commitments is at burnout or that mum is having more falls, is now wheelchair bound and has some level of dementia along with chronic pain because her vertebra are crumbling from her years of manual physical work. I also work in home care community support, so I see and know of the people sitting on high level packages with tens of thousands of unspent funds, often there actual needs are far less than my mums. This excess money is Sitting in major home care providers bank accounts earning interest for them. I hear how a person who had used so little of their approved funding so had a huge amount, yet the ‘final’ amount left according to the large provider was only a few thousand. Does anyone ask what happens to those huge unspent funds when the recipient goes into residential care or dies? I have been told that money doesn’t go back into funding home care packages, so either enlighten me or find out where does this money get reabsorbed by the government and the providers?
Hi Belinda, We are extremely saddened to hear about what is taking place regarding your mother. Would you be open to allowing us to tell some of this story within an article we are currently writing about waiting lists for home care packages? If not, that’s totally fine too.
Kind regards,
HelloCare team