In the January to March 2026 quarter, 1,629 of the 2,560 residential aged care homes that reported care minutes (63.63%) met both their total care minutes and registered nurse (RN) care minutes targets. The other 931 missed at least one. For a multi-site group, each of those results belongs to a single home, measured against...
What is a Higher Everyday Living Fee? A Higher Everyday Living Fee, or HELF, is a charge a residential aged care home can offer residents for services that go beyond the standard offer every resident already receives. It replaced the old Extra Service and Additional Service fees when the Aged Care Act 2024 commenced on 1 November 2025. Offering...
For most of the last decade, residential aged care providers had two ways to earn revenue above the Government’s care and accommodation funding: the Extra Service Fee, for homes with a formally approved higher-standard offering, and the Additional Service Fee, for the optional extras residents could choose to pay for. Both were imperfect, but both...
85.7% of residents rated their consumer experience good or excellent in the October to December 2025 quarter, according to GEN Aged Care Data. That figure is not a single measurement. It is six separately scored attributes of care quality, banded together into one aggregate number before it reaches a board pack, which means two providers...
A residential aged care provider’s Star Ratings page shows four or five stars for Compliance. A board member checks it before a quarterly meeting and moves on to the next agenda item, satisfied that governance is in hand. Across the sector, that satisfaction is common. Whether it is warranted depends on a detail the published rating does not disclose. The Aged Care...
Pressure injury documentation in Australian residential aged care follows a familiar pattern. The skin integrity assessment is completed and entered. The wound management form is initiated. The repositioning schedule is added as a care plan action. All three entries exist. All three are thorough. Under routine clinical governance, that is usually where the conversation stops. It stops in...
Every residential aged care provider with active restraints maintains a restraint register. Most also conduct scheduled reviews and document them in progress notes. What most providers do not have is a record that can confirm, without cross-referencing three separate sources, that the review occurred at the documented time, that the consent in place at that moment...
The shift had been busy. The afternoon Registered Nurse completed the handover at 22:00, briefed the incoming night team verbally, and filled in the handover sheet. One resident had shown increased confusion during the afternoon, which the outgoing nurse communicated during the briefing. The night shift came on. The handover sheet was filed. At 02:30, the resident...
There is a version of this scenario in almost every residential aged care facility. A medication incident occurs. It is documented. The MAR shows the administration. The progress note exists. And when the question arrives, whether it’s from a Commission reviewer, from a SIRS investigation, from a board risk conversation, the record cannot answer it....
