Quality of Care and Financial Outcomes of Home Care Providers in Regional, Rural and Remote Australia

Thursday 13 October 2022

11:15am – 11:45am

Speaker Bio

David Brown is Professor of Management Accounting at the University of Technology Sydney. His research and teaching is primarily focused on how to design and use management and accounting systems to address behavioral, decision making and coordination problems in organizations. He is best known for his work on management control system packages, some of which is featured in his research paper published in Management Accounting Research (coauthored with Teemu Malmi in 2008) which continues to be highly read and cited. However, David’s research interests span environmental sustainability, mental models and decision making, interorganisational research contracting, open strategy and innovation, sustainable agriculture, and management of research performance in universities. He has undertaken a range of projects with CPA Australia, including a joint research project with the Strategic Business Management Centre of Excellence on factors that influence the adoption of Activity-Based Costing and Management in Australian Firms, as well as projects on the current use of the Balanced Scorecard and Predictive Business Analysis in Australia. Two of his recent projects involve cross disciplinary research teams. The first is the Leadership and Change for Energy Efficiency in Accounting and Management project, funded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. This project became a finalist in both the Green Gown Awards Australasia 2013 and Green Globe Awards 2013, receiving an award of highly commended for both in the categories of Learning and Teaching and Energy Efficiency respectively. The second is the Accounting for Value Chain Sustainability and Competitive Advantage project, which investigates sustainability and cotton and is funded by the Australian Government Cotton Research and Development Corporation. Before pursuing an academic career David accumulated extensive experience in private industry which has both informed his teaching and has been particularly useful in undertaking research that has practical as well as theoretical relevance.

Abstract 

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (RCACQS) held a dedicated hearing on the challenges of providing aged care services in regional, rural and remote areas. In their testimony, home care providers highlighted issues such as the difficulty of recruiting staff, the additional costs involved in providing services when customers are geographically dispersed, and the problem of maintaining financial viability in a relatively small market. This session provides a more detailed understanding of the operating environment for regional home care providers based on an analysis of data on financial and quality of care outcomes.

This study used retrospective data on 573 unique Australian home care providers between 2015 and 2019 obtained under the legal authority of the RCACQS. We conducted regression analyses to examine differences in the provider profitability and quality of care outcomes between regional and metropolitan home care providers, after controlling for other determinants. This session will present evidence that regional providers are associated with higher financial performance, although there is greater disparity in the financial viability of regional providers, and that regional providers are associated with fewer complaints per resident, consistent with the provision of higher quality of care.