Improving the quality and safety of care for older people living in aged care settings is a key imperative for national health and social care systems globally. Quality and safety indicator systems have been developed, validated, and implemented internationally to measure and monitor quality of care constructs that reflect both care processes and outcomes in aged care.
In Australia, the mandatory aged care QI program began on July 1, 2019. The program collects QI data from all residential aged care services within Australia every 3 months and provides RACF specific benchmarked reporting to the industry.
The aim of this project was to select interRAI-based residential aged care facility (RACF) quality indicators (QIs) that could be recommended for collection in Australia as part of a minimum data set; to measure and report on quality of care in RACF, and enable participation in benchmarking activities.
This QI development project is part of the ‘Aged Care Data Compare’ project (ACDC), a project funded by the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre and industry partners – the Bupa Foundation and the Australian Department of Health. The ACDC project’s goal is to create infrastructure that can support benchmarking of quality measures within and between residential care providers.
