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Following the release of a national ANMF aged care survey report, the union has called for mandated shift-by-shift ratios to replace mandatory minutes. The information below provides some background on mandatory daily average resident care minutes and why they are not working.
What are the mandatory daily average care minutes?
The 2021 aged care royal commission final report recommendation 86 required providers to meet a minimum staff time quality and safety standard.
Mandatory daily average resident care minutes have been in place since October 2023. The current reporting requirements mean that minutes are averaged over each quarter, consider the individual resident’s Australian National Aged Care Classification (ANACC) assessment, and allow peaks and troughs.
From 1 October 2022: residential aged care facilities started receiving funding to voluntarily meet the daily average of 200 care minutes per resident. This comprised 40 minutes by a registered nurse and the remainder by an enrolled nurse and, in the private sector, personal care workers.
From 1 October 2023: residential aged care facilities were legally required to provide the daily average of 200 care minutes per resident, including 40 minutes by a registered nurse.
From 1 October 2024: the minimum average daily care minutes increased from 200 to 215 minutes per resident, including 44 minutes by a registered nurse – as required by the royal commission recommendation. Approved registered providers were able to start using enrolled nurses to meet up to ten percent of their registered nurse care minutes.
Are providers meeting their care minute obligations?
The recent ANMF ‘Aged Care Pulse Check’ survey results showed that aged care nurses and personal care workers are still working with chronic understaffing.
The Federal Department of Health, Disability and Ageing quarterly reports show a significant number of residential aged care providers are not meeting their legislated mandatory targets for total daily average care minutes (215 minutes) and registered nurse daily average care minutes (44 minutes).
The latest report, January to March 2026 found of 2560 facilities:
- 921 facilities (almost 40%) did not meet both the required total daily average care minutes and the required daily average registered nurse minutes
- 306 facilities (11.95%) met neither target
- 625 facilities (24.41%) met one target.
Members can check if their workplace is meeting care minutes via the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s care minute performance page.
Understaffing is profitable
The most recent University of Technology Sydney Australia’s Aged Care Sector: Full-Year Report 2024-25 (page 102) provides insights into the ‘financial implications’ for providers when they do not comply with their care minute targets.
The report found the cost savings of understaffing for providers may be more than the penalties of not meeting minutes.
Facilities that did not comply with the direct care and indirect care minute target recorded the highest direct care surplus at $25.01 per resident per day with an average direct care expenditure of $274.83, according to the report.
Facilities meeting both targets had the lowest surplus at $11.28 per resident per day.
What are the care minute compliance measures?
The Albanese Government wrote to all aged care providers in October 2024, a year after the implementation of mandatory care minutes, noting compliance was ‘disproportionally low in metropolitan areas even though it is understood that workforce constraints are generally greater in regional, rural and remote areas.’ The government also observed that for-profit facilities’ compliance rates were lower than not-for-profit facilities.
Recognising providers’ self-reporting compliance with care minutes was not enough, the Albanese Government has introduced tougher compliance measures: These included:
- January 2025: The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission introduced enforceable undertakings with individual providers which involved a legally binding set of actions, such as recruitment of more nurses, to ensure providers met care minute targets.
- January 2025: the definition of personal care worker/assistant in nursing for the purpose of care minutes was changed and tightened.
- Starting in the 2025-26 financial year: all residential aged care providers must engage a registered external auditor to audit their annual Care Minutes Performance Statement.
- April 2026: all non-specialised metropolitan providers started to lose funding if they did not meet their total care minute and total registered nurse care minute targets in the last quarter of 2025.
What are ANMF’s concerns with care minutes?
Mandated daily care minutes are publicly reported and audited as an average over a three-month period.
This averaging means when ANMF members raise concerns with their union about understaffing, we have no visibility of rosters and whether the facility is meeting its care minutes and staffing requirements on a shift, across a day or a week.
The lack of transparency means that nurses and carers cannot verify a provider’s claim that it has met the care minute targets. As an example, if a provider doesn’t replace someone on sick leave, but leaves them on the roster for reporting purposes, they appear to have met the targets. Nurses and carers on that shift must pick up the slack and they are telling ANMF chronic understaffing is burning them out.
Fewer staff means less time with residents; and violence and aggression is often linked to rushed care, with residents not getting the care they require, and nurses not having the time to:
- properly assess the needs of residents
- implement nursing interventions and
- de-escalate if required when behaviours are escalating (often due to these unmet needs).
ANMF (Vic Branch) has raised multiple understaffing issues of behalf of members with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) with no success. As a key stakeholder in the industry, the ANMF believes the Commission has been left out of discussions about the problems.
There is a disconnect between the level of bureaucracy, red tape, external audits and consultants required to ensure providers are complying with care minutes, whilst the averaging system makes it impossible for workers to clearly interpret if their employer is meeting these requirements. We know that there are still a significant number of facilities failing to comply, indicating a simpler and more transparent safe staffing system is needed. This is why Federal ANMF is calling for the implementation of aged care ratios.
What about staffing levels in public residential aged care facilities?
Victoria has had mandated minimum ratios in 159 residential public aged care facilities for 25 years. These ratios were originally part of the 2000 Victorian public sector nurses and midwives EBA and then enshrined in legislation by the Andrews Labor Government in 2015.
Victoria’s public aged care ratios are one nurse to seven residents on the morning shift, plus a nurse in charge; one nurse to eight residents, plus a nurse in charge on the afternoon shift; and one nurse to 15 residents on the night shift.
Victorian public sector residential aged care facilities must still comply with mandatory care minutes.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided some brutal lessons about the impact of safe minimum staffing levels that we must not forget. While Victoria’s public residential aged care facilities had mandated minimum ratios, it was common for private and not-for-profit facilities to have ratios of one nurse to 30 and sometimes one nurse to 90 overnight.
During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, three public aged care residents contracted COVID-19 and none died, while 655 residents died with the virus in private and not-for-profit residential aged care facilities.
