In this issue of The Weekly SOURCE we discuss how Lifestyle Communities lost $950 million in value in three months, thanks to three media reports on ABC TV. With village residents now significantly older, media alarm bells should be ringing.
Our prediction is that the incidence of bad media coverage of individual villages is going to increase; it is going to be far more emotive and every village operator is going to be negatively impacted.
The reasons are simple. The first is that with no aged care beds being built and the baby boomer bubble upon us, village residents won’t be able to get beds and so expect the village operator to ensure they are cared for in the village.
The second is that many operators are not set up to care for residents. The operator staff is often just two to three people with a primary responsibility to administer the property and the residents.
The third is most home care operators don’t have the qualified staff to provide clinical support at scale, only daily living support. Thirty residents in a village with high frailty will be difficult to service.
The children of the residents will be complaining and taking their grievances to government and the media, as they have in the past but now in significantly bigger numbers.
This will place image pressures on the whole village sector, especially around what was promised in marketing and sales by the operators.
In this issue we carry a message from Daniel Gannon, Executive Director of the Retirement Living Council, stating how important it is that all village operators sign up to the Code of Conduct.
Operators must be proactive in implementing good governance and procedures, so the sector can sit at a position of strength, confident that it has transparent and good systems to support residents.
This clipping was from Sunday, Australia Day. The Sun-Herald in Sydney published on Page 6 that one man cost private insurers $753,000 in a public hospital while waiting 613 days for a bed in residential aged care.
Imagine, as a village operator you have one or many residents that require residential aged care level of support but can’t get it and are stuck in your village. What will be the family and the community’s expectation of you to support these residents – and the cost.
And if you don’t provide it, what will the media say?
Check out the Code of Conduct message HERE. Sign up – it’s important.
