UnitingCare Australia warns it will quit providing residential aged care

One of Australia’s biggest aged care providers told the Senate’s aged care inquiry that without “substantive positive funding reform” it would have to withdraw from the provision of residential aged care.

UnitingCare Australia, which represents about 12% of places nationwide, told a Senate committee hearing in March that the sector needed greater investment.

The organisation’s Victorian aged care branch has closed two facilities in recent years and is planning to close another one in the next 12 months.

“They are facilities that are not meeting current community expectations and we cannot rebuild them and be financially sustainable,” said the executive director of Uniting Aged Care, Robyn Batten.

Ms Batten said plans for a proposed 90-bed facility in Victoria had been scrapped because preliminary calculations showed the home would lose $20 million over 20 years.

“[That] is not based on poor performance of our organisation, it is based on the published Stewart Brown benchmarks,” she said.

“We cannot pay for that capital when that is how much we would lose over 20 years, so we will not do that. We cannot do that.”

Only one small facility within the UnitingCare Australia network applied for beds in the current Aged Care Approvals Round.