Professor Joseph Ibrahim says forensic accountants should be sent into aged care homes to determine what providers spend on staffing

The ever-outspoken Monash University researcher and Royal Commission star witness strikes again. The Professor of forensic medicine and Head of the Health Law and Ageing Research Unit made the comments in response to an article published in the Medical Journal of Australia this week by Professor Kathy Eagar, the Director of the Australian Health Services Research Institute (AHSRI) at the University of Wollongong  and two colleagues this week reflecting the evidence she gave to the Aged Care Royal Commission last year. Professor Eagar says her research has found more than half of Australia’s aged care residents are in homes that would only rank one or two stars under the American nursing home rating system. Professor Ibrahim agrees – and he says the problem is the lack of transparency for what things cost in the aged care sector such as staffing. His solution?

“We need a team of forensic accountants to go through 10 or 20 homes that volunteer to be scrutinised,” he told the MJA’s InSight+. “Then we will know where the money is being spent. We will see if they don’t have enough money or if it’s not being managed as well as it can be. Or whether the market forces are such that no matter how brilliant they are, it’s always going to be a struggle. At the moment we can’t really tell which of those scenarios are there.”

The need to determine how much it costs to actually deliver care is an issue that has been raised at the Royal Commission – without any real answers so far. The same article features comments from the CEO of Not For Profit HammondCare, Dr Stephen Judd, who makes the point that the current funding model is flawed.

“The model we have today is how much governments want to pay and how much they believe residents should pay, then somehow we have to manage a staffing mix from that,” he said.

Dr Judd suggests the Government needs to work out how much care is required – then decide how to pay for it. Perhaps a better solution than raiding aged care homes’ files.