Here’s an all too common scene: a nurse finishes a shift having been sworn at, shoved, or worse, and still hasn’t had time to properly check on every resident. According to a new survey of the aged care workforce, that’s not a bad day, it’s close to normal.
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) has released its “Aged Care Pulse Check” survey, drawing on responses from more than 3,550 nurses and care workers. The headline finding: despite the Aged Care Act reforms, understaffing, workplace violence and funding opacity remain entrenched – and boards should be paying attention to what that means for risk exposure.
What the survey found
Staffing and skills mix
- 49.03% of staff said they had insufficient time to deliver care (55.75% at for-profit providers)
- 47.52% rated the nursing-to-care-staff ratio as inadequate
- 39.71% rated overall staffing as “inadequate,” “poor” or “very poor”
Violence and aggression
- 96.43% experienced or witnessed violence or aggression in the past 12 months
- 76.69% reported verbal aggression; 69.68% reported physical violence
- Workers who rated staffing as “very poor” were more likely to report violence (ANMF frames this as a correlation, not a cause)
Funding and cost control
- 20.22% said budget constraints meant residents missed out on needed services
- Respondents reported sick leave and agency shifts frequently going unfilled, and supplies such as wound dressings rationed
- ANMF says these patterns hold despite $25 billion in annual government investment in residential care.
The governance question
For boards, the uncomfortable part isn’t the numbers: it’s the gap between reform intent and reported reality. Mandated care minutes were meant to be an enforceable floor. If workers are reporting the same pressures three years into implementation, that’s a compliance and reporting question as much as a workforce one.
ANMF’s proposed fix is structural:
- Replace care minutes with mandated staffing ratios
- Mandate standardised risk assessment for violence prevention, and
- Legislate public reporting of how funding is actually spent.
It’s also called for a “staged de-privatisation strategy” to shift services away from for-profit ownership, a position that goes well beyond what this survey alone can support, and one boards should recognise as advocacy, not neutral analysis.
Reading the data with the source in mind
This is ANMF’s survey, promoted by ANMF, in support of ANMF’s long-held policy platform.
That doesn’t make the findings wrong, but it does mean the figures are self-reported by union members, not independently verified, and providers and government haven’t yet had the chance to respond to the specific claims.
Boards weighing this should treat it as a starting point for their own scrutiny, not a verdict.
What this means for providers
Care minutes reporting is back under the microscope, so expect this survey to feature in submissions during any future audit or compliance review
Workplace violence is increasingly being framed as a governance failure, not just a WHS issue, and boards without a standardised risk assessment protocol should treat this as a gap to close before it’s raised externally
Financial transparency is the recurring theme across ANMF’s asks, so providers should expect continued pressure for public reporting of how government funding translates into rostered hours and resident services.
