What the New Care Minutes Report Tells Us, and Where the Real Levers Are
- Health Generation
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The Australian Government has released its latest Care Minutes in Residential Aged Care Dashboard, providing an updated, aggregated view of how residential aged care homes are tracking against mandated care minute targets.
The dashboard reports sector-level performance across:
total care minutes per resident per day
RN care minutes
and how outcomes change when EN time is included
Source:
When read carefully, the data offers several clear and useful insights.
Total care minutes are largely being met at scale
The dashboard shows that around 67% of homes met total care minute targets in the most recent reporting period.
At a sector level, this suggests that funding settings are, in aggregate, translating into care delivery. Total care minutes are no longer where the system is most constrained.
This does not eliminate risk at individual service level, but it does change where leaders should focus their attention.
RN minutes depend heavily on how the workforce is structured
On the surface, RN care minutes appear to be the main pressure point:
only around 54% of homes met RN care minute targets on an RN-only basis
But the picture changes materially when EN minutes are included:
80.93% of homes met RN care minute targets when EN time is counted
This is one of the most important insights in the report.
It tells us that:
the sector is not short of clinical care capacity overall
but is heavily reliant on how RN and EN roles are blended in practice
The EN workforce is not filling a gap at the margins.
It is doing a substantial share of the clinical work that allows services to meet expectations.
This reframes the workforce conversation
The data suggests that the issue is not simply “RN shortages”, but how:
RN oversight
EN clinical delivery
and PCW support
are combined into a coherent model
Services that treat ENs as a deliberate, supported part of their clinical workforce are far closer to target than those relying on RN minutes alone.
From a system perspective, this is not a compromise, it is a structurally sound strategy.
Geography still matters less than system design
The dashboard continues to show that remote and very remote services often meet care minute targets at higher rates than metropolitan services.
Combined with the EN data, this reinforces a consistent message:
clear scope of practice
well-defined role mix
and tight linkage between funding, rostering and reporting
matter more than size or location.
What leaders should take from this
The latest care minutes data does not point to a sector running out of capacity.
It points to a sector that is learning how to deploy its workforce more intelligently.
Three things are now clear:
total care minutes are largely achievable at scale
RN minutes look constrained if viewed in isolation
ENs are a critical part of the solution, not a stop-gap
Leaders who move early to design a deliberate RN–EN workforce model will find themselves operating with far more headroom, operationally and regulatorily.
That is the real clarity the data offers.
