Professor Lee-Fay Low
Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney
I am tremendously excited that ARIIA is offering research partnership grants to improve aged care in Australia. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s a really challenging time to be planning and undertaking research in aged care. I’ve been an aged care researcher for 20 years, and the conditions make it really, really difficult. Here are some of the problems that my teams have been facing. If you have solutions, please share them. Tweet @leefay_low and we can keep this conversation going.
COVID-19 was a huge disruption to research
With ongoing workforce issues exacerbated by COVID-19, aged care organisations have had extremely limited bandwidth for research since 2020. Many aged care research partner organisations have had markedly less capacity to participate and contribute, despite a strong commitment to the projects. We have paused or downsized projects because aged care staff could not help with our research. I personally feel like some projects have lost momentum in terms of showing efficacy or being ready to scale.
Current aged care reforms make rigorous relevant study design harder
At the time of writing, the new Aged Care Act is passing through Parliament. There will be major changes to the way that home and residential care is structured, funded and regulated, but policies and programs have not been finalised yet.
This means that some observational data we collect now might be less relevant after reforms (e.g., why do home care clients ‘save’ so much of their budget). It also means that long intervention studies (e.g., a 12-month staff practice change randomised trial rolled out over 2 years) might be confounded by system-wide changes. As we write our grants for funding for 2023 and beyond, it is trickier to design a potential impactful, competitive-for-funding project.
Implementation of aged care reforms will continue to occupy the aged care sector
Implementation of aged care reforms will likely result in strategic changes in aged care organisation priorities. Executive teams and managers will be busy working to implement changes required by the reforms, and providers are likely to continue to have reduced bandwidth to collaborate on research over the next few years. We need to figure out how to reengage our aged care partners.
What can aged care researchers do?
In planning future grants, we’ve started to think about research that might be useful in terms of implementing or evaluating the reforms. We are also talking to aged care providers and policymakers about the research questions most of interest to them. We may need to budget in more support for aged care organisations if we want our research projects to be feasible.
We shouldn’t strive to conduct easier research projects; we should strive to conduct research projects which answer important real-world questions. I believe it is critical that right now we should be conducting research that answers questions about how to improve aged care.
*The views and opinions expressed in Knowledge Blogs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of ARIIA, Flinders University and/or the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.