Around half of Australian aged care homes are losing money , prompting concerns about their long-term financial viability and the potential for closures – particularly in the country. Aged care homes in rural and remote areas face many specific challenges. Servicing a dispersed population of older people in need, they tend to be smaller in scale, find it hard to attract and retain staff, and face high costs and ongoing losses.
And yet data shows the levels of care that these homes deliver, on average, exceed that of homes in the cities. Similarly, residents in rural homes rate their own experiences more highly. Rural aged care has many financial challenges Aged care homes in small rural towns and remote communities have long suffered high operating losses, averaging A$2,200 per resident a year in 2018–19.
This compares to homes in the cities achieving a small financial surplus of around $2,500 per resident. Five years later, the situation has deteriorated for homes across all regions. But the losses faced by rural and remote homes have blown out to $8,600 per resident a year, nearly twice that of their city counterparts at $4,500.
Contributing factors for these financial outcomes have been: lower occupancy rates greater reliance on high-cost agency nurses and personal care workers higher costs of providing food, laundry, cleaning and other everyday living services and accommodation. Home closures in these small towns and villages cause significant disruptions for resident.