When the government launched the National Quality Indicator Program, it came with a specific promise: this data wouldn’t be used to check up on providers. That promise is now being tested.
Adam Holcroft, General Manager at QPS Benchmarking – a company that supports hundreds of aged care providers with quality indicator data collection – says the government’s current assurance activity is reaching further than advertised.
“They’re not checking residents themselves, but they’re checking the data at the resident record level, which is a very onerous and invasive procedure, in my opinion,” Holcroft said.
That’s not a technicality. It’s the difference between a spot-check and an audit trail. Boards signed off on data-sharing arrangements built for one purpose; they’re now being used, in effect, for another.
The compliance bill nobody costed
Holcroft’s bigger concern isn’t the policy intent: it’s the execution. Requests for custom data formats and resident-level tables have landed on providers with no warning, he says, forcing businesses like QPS to pull software developers off paid client work to build one-off reports.
“We’re kind of in between the two, trying to make the process efficient for them and accurate for the government,” Holcroft said. “We got the push and the pull between two sides.”
Think of it as a subcontractor absorbing scope creep with no variation order. Someone pays for that gap eventually – and right now, it’s falling on providers and their data partners, not the department that changed the requirements.
Consolidation risk, not just cost risk
Holcroft argues this pressure isn’t evenly distributed. Larger providers have the leverage to push back on the department; smaller regional and rural operators don’t.
“If we want diverse options of services in our industry, then it’s important that we support smaller providers with all these changes,” Holcroft said. “Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a Woolworths–Coles situation of care.”
Between 2017 and 2025, the number of smaller aged care providers has drastically dropped by 32%, while the number of larger providers has grown by 37%. And today, StewartBrown’s most recent residential aged care survey reports that 62% of aged care homes are running at a loss, compared to 49% in March 2025.
Is reform pressure the quiet driver of market consolidation? If so, smaller providers who can least absorb compliance cost are at a huge disadvantage. In scenarios like these, the people who are likely to lose out most are the ones that need the greatest support.
Workforce knowledge is walking out the door
Beyond cost, Holcroft flags an operational risk boards rarely see on a dashboard: the institutional knowledge that sits in the minds of one or two staff members who know how to pull the data together manually.
“There’s a lot of retirements, there’s a lot of change going on – I find it can be difficult to pass that [operational knowledge] on,” he said.
That’s a single point of failure sitting inside a compliance obligation. When that person leaves, the reporting capability leaves with them – no handover process, no redundancy, no documentation. It’s a governance gap most boards would flag immediately if it applied to financial controls. Applied to quality reporting, it’s been left unmanaged.
The unanswered question
Holcroft’s sharpest point may be this: providers report extensively, but receive almost nothing back.
“We don’t even get performance reports back [to tell us] if there’s any benefit from all of this work,” he said. “The systems that are measuring performance should be measured themselves.”
For governance-literate readers, that’s the real accountability gap. Boards are directing resources toward compliance obligations with no feedback loop confirming those obligations are improving outcomes. That’s not a data problem. It’s a design problem. And one only the department can fix.
