Insight: Aged Care Workforce Crisis

The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA)’s new report, Duty of care: How to fix the aged care worker shortage, says current labour agreements aren’t working — and calls for a more effective Essential Skills Visa to bring in much-needed workers.

Having worked with and supported providers in this space, here’s my simplified take on this complex puzzle:

• Occupancy is high, there are often more prospective residents than beds, driven by an ageing population and limited new bed development.

• Providers must weigh funding and care-minute requirements when admitting residents, as they can’t accept everyone.

• Higher-acuity admissions increase funding but also raise workforce

pressure.

• Lower-acuity admissions ease staffing load but leave higher-need

residents stuck in hospitals or under-supported at home.

• Workforce shortages create compliance risks (low care-minute fulfilment) or push providers toward expensive agency use, which funding rarely covers.

• Uplifting AN-ACC classifications might raise funding short-term but drives up future care-minute obligations and workforce costs.

• Replacing agency hours with stable staff is ideal, but regional homes struggle to attract enough workers even with generous relocation offers.

• That leaves international recruitment, which remains complex and underused, as CEDA highlighted.

The whole thing is a balancing act, and there’s no single fix to these interconnected challenges. It will take a coordinated, long-term effort between government, providers, and the broader workforce system to ensure older Australians receive the dignified care they deserve.

At Health Generation and Nurse Generation, we’ve been working alongside providers across Australia to manage the balancing act unique to each organisation through practical solutions such as:

• Funding optimisation

• Funding and care-minute alignment

• End-to-end international recruitment including: recruitment, visa, relocation, and workforce integration.