Elder care regulators have been accused of "unacceptable ignorance" of the standards of work for consultants who are paid tens of millions of dollars to inspect nursing homes across the country.
The Council on Quality and Safety in Aged Care (ACQSC) revealed that a third of all safety and quality audits conducted by consultants in the last 12 months, involving around 350 aged homes, were initially rejected for non-compliance.
Australia's Guardian reported that the four companies were paid more than $40 million to carry out the work, despite announcing 528 actual, potential or perceived conflicts of interest. The European Commission spent $1.6 million to support 99 consultants and set up a quality assurance team.
Aged Care Workers The world's first Australian study found that only half of the time they receive proper care.
Greens Senator Janet Rice criticized Commissioner Janet Anderson after she told her at a Senate evaluation hearing in late October that only a "small fraction" of advisers' audits had been initially rejected because of substandard work.
"Anderson's answer to me was that the problem was with only a small percentage of audit firms, suggesting that they are not acceptable when outsourcing sensitive and complex tasks to for-profit organizations," Rice said. ”
This acknowledgment, along with hundreds of reported conflicts of interest, illustrates what can go wrong when a for-profit consultant is brought in to do a job that should be handled by **. ”
Mr. Anderson did not respond directly to Mr. Rice's criticism, but he said there was "rigorous quality assurance" in each audit and that the workload carried out by consultants had decreased in recent months. Once the work is done, all audits are finally accepted.
"Depending on the size and complexity of the services being audited and the observations of the quality assessment team, the length of the audit report can be as high as 100 pages or more," Anderson said. ”
When we mention a report that requires extra work, it can include adding extra details or clarifying observations, changing formatting, or correcting typographical errors. ”
Since 2021, more than two-thirds of the audits have been completed by these four companies – RSM, HDAA, SAI Global and KPMG. They were hired to help address the backlog of inspections during the pandemic, when lockdowns prevented on-site visits. All companies have been contacted in response to criticism of their work.
Australian Capital Territory Independent Senator David Pocock said he was concerned about the initial rejection rate as some of Australia's most vulnerable people live in nursing homes.
"There is a place for contracting work, but it is deeply disturbing to find that two-thirds of aged care board on-site audits are outsourced, and a third of those audits are not up to standard," Pocock said. ”
The European Commission is the regulator. On-site audits are their core business, and this should be a capability that they have in-house. ”
D**id Tune, a former senior civil servant who conducted an independent assessment of the commission's capacity, described aged care audits as "a core function of the commission" and warned that the extent of outsourcing poses "significant risks".
Beth Vincent-Pitsch, National Deputy Secretary General of the Community and Public Sector Alliance, has also again criticized outsourcing.
"If Albanese Labor** really wants to improve the quality of aged care across the country, then they need experienced, candid and fearless civil servants to do the work of aged care regulators," Vincent-Pietsch said. ”
But Charles Maskell-Knight, a former senior adviser to the Ministry of Health and a senior adviser to the Royal Commission, has defended the use of advisers in certain circumstances.
"If there is a choice between not conducting an audit at all and using a third party to do it due to staffing shortages, it is clearly in the interest of people receiving aged care to do it, even if it is done by a consultant," Maskell-Knight said. ”
In view of the inherent risks of conflicts of interest and poor performance, I believe that the AAAC will make every effort to ensure that there are internal staff to carry out its core functions and to avoid the need for outsourcing. ”