Best Ever?
It has been a long time since I have re-watched sessions from a conference weeks later. But I found myself doing that after Chris Baynes and DCM Institutes excellent Leaders Summit in Sydney recently.
What is Leaders Summit?
Leaders Summit brings together C-suite folk from across the senior housing and aged care sector and s the only place where retirement living, residential aged care and home care come together. And this year, DCM added the remote patient monitoring crowd from insurers Amplar Health and BUPA for their clinical care in the home services. More on this later.
Problem statement?
Key speakers emphasised the scope and scale of the current problem. The thesis is, we need 10,000 new aged care beds built in Australia every year for 10 years to cope with an ageing population with increasing co-morbidities. The current rate is 1-2,000 per year and the economics of aged care are a disincentive to build more. Residents in retirement villages who need higher care will have no place to go. They will increasingly move into and “hold” village units, receive “level 5” high care packages, and refuse to leave. And village operators cannot legally force them to do so. Chris’s prediction – 100,000 retirement village beds will be de facto aged care beds in 10 years. So the sector better embrace this.
Private aged care as the solution?
The focus on private aged care as a solution was evident. Chris featured LDK Healthcare, Odyssey, Hyegrove and others, who are either integrated retirement, continuum of care, or private aged care operators. And whilst all spoke to varying models, they shared the central idea of moving once into a retirement living, ageing in place with access to a full care offering, all from the one provider, funded by a mix of government funding and private pay. Of course not every village operator offers this, and Sally Taylor at Moran Retirement gave an eloquent defence of focussing on wellness, enablement and living your best life, and why not, their beautiful Sage community at Cronulla is hugely popular. Nevertheless, the theme was clear. The retirement sector better adopt care because that is what a large segment of the customers wants.
No right solution today
What struck us was the common thread that there is no right solution today for private aged care. Each operator is struggling with systems. As one operator puts it “We are not just a retirement village, nor just a home care provider, nor are we residential aged care. There is no right system for us today.” Eevi has a view on how to build an integrated and coherent platform to support retirement living and care delivery in one community. We are planning with DCM to bring to market a Masterclass on Private Aged Care – a kind of “how to” guide. Stay tuned.
Insurers and their expanding role.
As an aside, we believe we caught a glimpse of the future. Amplar Health (formerly Medibank) presented their superb clinical care in the home operation. The challenge to the heavily fragmented home care sector was muted, but clear, you will need to step up to clinical care in the home or you will be overtaken. On discharging an insured from primary care, the insurer will deliver them into the care of their own clinical and home care organisations. They bring a mix of SAHP, rebatable items, user pays and private health insurance funding to the table in a seamless way. They are innovative, for example, witness the JV with Pullman hotels to create 24 short stay “RACF beds”. And they are building system capacity with virtual care centres and virtual service delivery, already employing 900 GPs, 700 RNs, 115 OTs and Physios. It is a powerful offering. The health insurers have the incentive and the capability to break the elder care system and make it work for them, and it has always been thus.
AI and Future Disrupters?
We really loved the discussion about successful, and failed, introductions of AI into the care workforce. E.g. leveraging “dead time” in the car to provide home care staff with support and training and follow up. More of that please. And the warning that future disruption is coming not from the people in the room, but from big retail, big health and big technology. Google Health, Amazon Medical and Apple Health are the tech platforms that will dominate, according to one prediction. Watch out!
In short
Loved it. Deep thought, a considered and careful curation of expert speakers, and a first-time experience of the whole eco system in once place. Congratulations to Chris and the team at DCM. Best Ever.
