As care minute obligations become stricter, providers must embrace innovation and be strategic to ensure they are compliant, which can be particularly challenging for providers servicing rural and remote locations.
That’s according to Thursday’s webinar on strengthening care delivery through compliance and strategy webinar hosted by technology and benchmarking company Mirus Australia. Panelists Whiddon deputy chief executive officer Alyson Jarrett, Clayton Church Homes chief executive officer Jo Boylan and Churches of Christ Queensland general manager operations Donna Hart all agreed that pay increases were critical for staff retention and reaching minimum care minutes.
Other strategies include sign-on bonuses, retention bonuses, refer-a-friend payments and paying for relocation expenses, Ms Jarrett said.
Migrant nurses have also been incredibly important to Whiddon’s ability to reach care minute requirements, and Ms Jarrett said they had a dedicated education program to ensure migrant nurses were welcomed into the local communities they are servicing.
Clik here to view.
“Supporting them to be in those communities but also supporting them to understand what the delivery of aged care is in Australia,” she explained.
“And we all know that there’s an assumption sometimes by people that don’t work in aged care that the role of the registered nurses and enrolled nurses and carers is more simple, but it’s not. We’re caring for residents with multiple comorbidities, so there’s a real need to be at the top of your game in terms of staff skill.”
Overall, thinking outside of the box is necessary, and Ms Jarrett said Whiddon has even bought homes in places like Narrabri and Moree for employees to live in because the cost of accommodation is too high for people to relocate.
Ms Boylan said Clayton Church Homes implemented a refer-a-friend program as a means of attracting staff too, and that it was “extraordinarily great.”
Clik here to view.
While it takes a lot of training – much of which Ms Boylan said she did herself – she highly recommends the model.
However, to make sure the higher amounts of staff are still reaching good outcomes, Ms Boylan said it was necessary to develop a model of care.
Clayton Church Homes uses the clinical software system Person Centred Software, which creates live data of what staff are doing, and teams also hold weekly care meetings where they discuss where they are sitting in relation to care minute requirements.
“Another strategy was to put in back-filler staff. So if people were going to ring in sick, we had back-filler staff, depending on the size of the home, two-to-four back filler staff ready to go into those shifts, on the morning and afternoon shifts. That’s been a great way to reduce agency [use] and maintain morale in the staffing level and for the residents,” Ms Boylan added.
Clik here to view.
Ms Hart said Churches of Christ Queensland faced the additional hurdle of servicing a large geographical area across some very rural and remote locations and were very reliant on agencies to staff their rural spaces.
“I guess internally we had to look really closely at what our employee value proposition was going to be into the future as well. So it’s ensuring that… we could win over hearts and minds to bring different cohorts of staff groups into the aged care sector,” said Ms Hart.
One of the other strategies was to rally around existing staff who held ambitions to become registered nurses and provide them with as much support as they could to receive those qualifications, she said.
Hundreds share insights
The webinar also included insight into 255 organisations’ confidence in their ability to deliver the direct care minutes – including in response to the December MYEFO announcement about funding reductions from April 2026 for aged care services in metropolitan areas that do not meet their care minute targets from October 2025.
More than half of poll participants – 44 per cent agreed and 13 per cent strongly agreed – said these financial implications would move most of the aged care industry toward compliance.
Clik here to view.
However, the biggest impediment to meeting care minute requirements is available staffing (62 per cent), according to the survey. Financial constraints is next (26 per cent) followed by management time (11 per cent) and only 2 percent believe there are no impediments.
Clik here to view.
There is an overall sense of uncertainty that businesses could remain profitable and in surplus while maintaining full compliance with care minute requirements, with 41 per cent saying they are unsure. Of the rest 39 per cent who agreed or strongly agreed and 20 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed.
Clik here to view.
More than four in five providers either agreed (54 per cent) or strongly agreed (29 per cent) there should be a correlation between increased staffing and improved care outcomes and quality. On this question on one strongly disagreed, but 4 per cent disagreed and 13 per cent we unsure.
Clik here to view.
Close to 500 people registered for the webinar, of whom almost a third were c-suite executives, 16 came from the Department of Health and Aged Care, one from the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and four people from the South Australian government, a spokesperson from Mirus Australia told Australian Ageing Agenda.
A recording of the webinar and the slides is available here.
Mirus Australia recently merged with aged care software management system Management Advantage.
The next webinar, which takes place on 28 May, will cover the new rules and strengthened standards.
Comment on the story below. Follow Australian Ageing Agenda on LinkedIn and Facebook, sign up to our twice-weekly newsletter and subscribe to AAA magazine for the complete aged care picture.