Leadership

Workforce shortages remain a challenge, but technology is creating a new capability gap. Leaders who invest in continuous learning, workforce development and organisational adaptability will be best placed to navigate the future of Australia’s aged care sector.

Aged care’s greatest loss may not be funding or capacity — it may be the experienced leaders walking away. As reform fatigue deepens, Juniper Care CEO Russell Bricknell warns that exhaustion is driving talent from the sector and exposing the limits of an increasingly risk-averse system. From dignity of risk to lessons from Europe, he outlines why a fundamental shift in thinking may be needed to secure aged care’s future.

Aged Care Week 2026 brought sector leaders to Sydney to confront governance, AI, recruitment and rights-based care head-on. Across three days, a clear theme emerged: providers leaning into honest, on-the-ground lessons to shape a more sustainable future.

Outgoing Inspector-General Natalie Siegel-Brown tells a Senate inquiry that Support at Home’s assessment algorithm, means-testing design and co-payment structure are driving older Australians into costlier residential care. And warns the budget isn’t the problem – the administration is.

When 642 providers have become the new normal and consolidation still accelerating, the question boards should be asking isn’t whether consolidation can be stopped. It’s whether the leadership inside their organisation is built for what comes next.

The promise of aged care reform was better care, stronger safeguards and a more sustainable future. But nine months into the new regulatory landscape, many providers say the cost of compliance is draining resources, exhausting teams and making growth harder to achieve. In this candid interview, Juniper CEO Russell Bricknell reflects on the realities of reform, the challenge of building new capacity, and why long-term solutions remain trapped by short-term decision-making.

Dianne Shepherd has spent 20 years watching older Australians run out of cash while sitting on million-dollar homes. She says Support at Home doesn’t close the funding gap and that aged care providers are building care plans on assumptions that won’t hold.

The top home care package funds 20 hours a week. Advanced dementia needs round-the-clock supervision. What happens in the remaining 148 hours? Rosie Fitzgerald can tell you.

Retirement villages aren’t a lifestyle product: they’re health infrastructure. Daniel Gannon makes the case that without planning reform and supply investment, the pipeline crisis feeding hospital strain and aged care pressure will only deepen.

When public funding shapes what you can say, honest critique becomes a calculated risk. Russell Bricknell, CEO of Juniper Care, names the structural forces driving provider silence – and the viability crisis quietly narrowing who aged care can afford to serve.