More than half of Australian aged care providers say they’ve lost a staff member in the past year they believe they could have kept, and new polling suggests burnout, not pay, is the biggest driver of turnover.
The findings come from a survey of professionals across 123 Australian aged care organisations, conducted by Mirus Australia ahead of its national webinar on recruitment and retention. They paint a picture of a sector losing people it didn’t have to lose, and one that, in many cases, doesn’t fully understand why.
Asked whether their organisation had lost a staff member in the last 12 months they believed they could have kept, 52 per cent of providers said yes, and the majority of those had lost more than one person. A further 34 per cent said they weren’t sure, and only 14 per cent were confident the answer was no.
That means fewer than one in seven providers can say with confidence they aren’t losing people unnecessarily.
When asked to name the number one reason staff leave, providers pointed to:
Added together, the three factors largely within a provider’s own control (workload, culture and leadership) outweigh external pay competition roughly three to one.
Ben Sturzaker, GM of Product at Mirus Australia, said the results reflect a shift in what’s really driving people out the door. For years, he said, the conversation about turnover began and ended with pay, but providers are now describing the same pressures that workers themselves flagged in the government’s own workforce survey: burnout, workload and feeling unsupported.
Sturzaker pointed to the near-third of respondents who said they simply don’t know why their staff leave, alongside the fact that only a third measure morale regularly, as the finding the data kept circling back to. He was careful to frame it as a symptom of how stretched teams are rather than a criticism, but said it points to an uncomfortable starting point: providers can’t fix what they can’t see.
Two figures underline that visibility gap. Nearly a third of providers (31 per cent) admitted they aren’t sure why their staff leave at all. And when asked whether their organisation formally measures staff morale, only 35 per cent said they do so regularly. A further 34 per cent measure it only occasionally, while the remaining 30 per cent either don’t measure it at all or aren’t sure.
In other words, most providers are managing retention without a reliable read on morale in the first place.
The poll also asked providers whether attracting or keeping staff was the bigger challenge right now. Forty-two per cent said the two were equally hard, while attraction and retention were each named as the harder problem by 20 per cent of respondents.
Just 19 per cent said they were in a good position on workforce overall, meaning roughly four in five providers see workforce as a live risk, whichever end of the pipeline it’s coming from.
Tyler Fisher, Head of Data and Insights at Mirus Australia, argued the results point to retention being fundamentally a visibility problem.
He said workload, burnout and feeling undervalued typically show up in the roster, through unfilled shifts, repeat overtime and the same staff carrying the load week after week, well before they show up in a resignation letter.
Providers who can spot those patterns, he said, have the chance to fix the workload pressure before it costs them the person, and argued that looking after existing staff is the strongest workforce strategy available to providers right now.
Read together, the numbers suggest the retention conversation in aged care is moving on from pay parity alone. Providers say the more decisive factors (workload, recognition, leadership) are ones they can act on directly. But the same poll suggests many organisations don’t yet have the internal systems to see the problem coming: a third don’t know why people are leaving, and less than half regularly track morale.
The polling was conducted ahead of Mirus Australia’s webinar, Recruitment and retention: lessons from inside aged care, featuring Anthony Nguyen of ACRE and Richard de Haast, CEO of Scalabrini, discussing why staff really resign, how storytelling is changing who applies, and which retention strategies are working inside providers now.
The recording is available at mirusaustralia.com.
