This article explains the importance of reporting accurate care staffing minutes, and how it can be done more effectively to protect residents & improve the facility’s Star rating.
Overview
The Quarterly Financial Report (QFR) is a new reporting requirement for aged care providers that commenced from 1 July 2022. The report for the first quarter of the 2022-23 financial year was due on 4 November 2022.
The data reported by providers in the QFR will assist the Government in monitoring and supporting providers, which is key to minimising the risk of business failures and protecting consumers from potential disruptions to the care services they receive. Measures to increase financial transparency in the sector are also being introduced to allow consumers to make informed choices about their care.
The data collected through the QFR will be used for a range of purposes including:
Financial oversight: used to track, monitor, and benchmark the sector.
Consumer choice and transparency: provide information, including care minutes, to the Star Rating system where senior Australians and their families will have access to information to make informed choices.
Policy development: policy planning and development is informed by accurate data.
Funding and regulation: to inform the new Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) pricing model and monitor direct care minutes delivered by aged care facilities.
What is the purpose of reporting the direct care labour?
The residential care labour is broken down into care types including registered nurses, enrolled nurses, and personal care workers. This information will directly inform the performance of facilities against their care minutes targets (see What are care minutes? and How do I calculate my care minutes targets?) and will be published as part of the Star Ratings system. This will allow consumers to easily compare and make choices on residential aged care facilities and the care being provided at these facilities, and better match funding to resident needs and a more equitable distribution of funding.
Why is the Star Rating System important?
The care hours in conjunction with other qualitative information will be used to inform Star Ratings for individual aged care facilities.
The Star Rating system will provide simple ‘at-a-glance’ information on residential aged care facilities to support senior Australians, their families, friends and carers, compare facilities to make informed choices on care options.
See Star Ratings for provider details based on:
five quality indicators;
compliance ratings;
consumer experience; and
staff minutes of care (Staffing Rating contributes 22% to the overall Star Rating!) See example below:
Will the Star Rating be affected if data is not timely submitted?
Yes, not submitting the data will affect the Star Rating as the care minutes information will not be available to inform the Star Rating process, and there are no options to get extension to the due dates.
What happens to the care hours reported data?
The data submitted for care hours will be checked by the department to ensure that what has been reported is within a reasonable range of average across the sector.
When outside the expected range there is a window of 5 days to re-check the data.
Can the collection of Care minutes be automated?
“The challenge for the aged care providers is how to capture and report the time spent with each resident without this becoming an administrative burden on their staff, taking them away from focusing on providing the best possible care for their residents”.
“In order to eliminate this burden, you can use a Care Minute Reporting System based on Real Time Location System (RTLS) technology. This system automatically captures every interaction between caregiver, registered nurses and resident with detailed real-time reporting and alerts to ensure each resident receives the right amount of care minutes.
See How to automate Care minute reporting for Australian Care Providers for more information.
Star rating improvements
Contact us to assist you in complying to the care minute reporting requirements and ensure that you have the appropriate systems in place to access and provide quality data in your QFR, improve your star rating, enable Duress management, and more….