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The aged care staffing shortage is likely to deepen by 2025, a recent report found.
A National Skills Commission (NSC) report, released last week, said demand for care staff would rise by 40 per cent over four years but would not be met by enough working-aged Australians.
The nation will need to fill over 54,000 roles in aged and disability care and roughly 50,000 nursing positions.
"Over the next five years, we anticipate around a quarter of new jobs to be in the health care and social assistance sector," NSC chief Adam Boyton said.
"In fact, the two occupations [aged care worker and nurses] alone are likely to account for 10 per cent of all the new jobs created by 2025."
The growth and demand for care workers will clash with a vast reduction of working-aged Australians.
In 1980, there were 6.6 people of working age for every person aged 65 and over.
Currently, there are four people fit to work for every older person in Australia as of 2023.
"The impact of this combination of factors is already being seen," Boyton said.
The NSC report predicted that by 2060, there would only be 2.7 Australians available to care for each person over 65.
Earlier last year, the NSC released the Care Workforce Labour Market Study, commissioned by the Morrison government to examine Australia's care sector.
The study foreshadowed a shortfall of over 200,000 full-time care workers by 2050.
"These findings show the growth in the care and support workforce has been three times faster than
total employment across the Australian economy," the study said.
"This reflects the ongoing increase in demand for care and support in our country."
Boyton said that many care and health sector roles are "hard to automate as they are very human-centric."
"The level of skill required for these jobs reflects our analysis that the majority of growth will require more study after school," he said.
"It means that we must be prepared to reskill and retrain at many points across our lifetimes to navigate these trends in the job market."
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Perhaps aged care providers should consider the below to attract staff back
– employ management, team leaders who actually have training and experience and not expect staff to put up with inexperienced management learning on the job
– respect your workers
– listen to your workers when they report problems
– have departments who have been created to support staff to actually able to be contacted
– pay better wages
– don’t ignore your staff when trying to negotiate old outdated EBA – you will continue to loose staff and not be replaced because everyone in the industry recognises this
… just some of what may attract staff back to work in aged care
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Aged care providers do not consider the skilled labor inside the country but many NDIS providers use advertisements as their legal requirement to bring people from their own country ( Due to racism I won’t mention the Nationality) .I personally went through 5 of those interviews and selections and yet still their advertisement is visible in job sites. I have completed an MBA specialized in the Aged care Industry as well as completed the certificate IV in disability support and yet no Aged care facility is recruiting . So I don’t see where the labor shortage is .