As the aged care sector faces down the combined challenges of full occupancy in residential aged care, workforce shortages, and the looming influx of Baby Boomers, a panel at LEADERS SUMMIT 2025 examined how two providers are delivering on huge demand for clinical care with virtual services.
There are already about 1,600 older Australians currently languishing in hospital waiting for an aged care bed, 81,000 waiting for a home care package, and over the next 20 years it's estimated more than 60,000 people will turn 80 every year.
Emma Cornwell, Executive GM Health Services with Australia's largest home care provider Australian Unity, told the panel audience, "bold thinking" is required to "meet this demand at scale".
18 months ago, Australian Unity embarked on a "material transformation", investing heavily in technology and putting clinical care at the centre of their home care operations.
Australian Unity now has a team of more than 500 clinician specialists who delivers more than 400,000 episodes of face-to-face care, and almost 400,000 episodes of virtual care annually. This is on top of their workforce of more than 4,000 carers.
Also central to Australian Unity's restructure are Remedy Healthcare, the group's in-home care and telehealth provider, and Ramsay Connect, a joint venture between Remedy Healthcare and ASX-listed Ramsay Health Care, the largest operator of private hospitals in Australia.
"Lucky" Joe
The Australian Unity home care customer was 97 when he underwent major surgery.
"He is lucky," Emma said.
His family advocated for him to stay at home, and because Joe had a care plan including a GP, rehab team, registered nurse, personal carers, and domestic assistance, despite his age, frailty and complex needs, he was able to receive care at home where he remains today, aged 100.
"How can we make Joe the rule instead of the exception?" Emma asked the LEADERS SUMMIT audience.
2.3 million digital health interactions
Amplar Health has developed hospital-in-the-home and 'medi-hotel' models, most notably 24 rooms at Adelaide's Pullman Hotel to accommodate older hospital patients waiting for an aged care bed.
Bev Smith, Chief Commercial Officer, Amplar Health, told the LEADERS SUMMIT that Amplar Health has 1,750 clinical and medical staff, including 900 GPs working at 106 bricks-and-mortar GP clinics across the country, 700 nurses, and a strong allied allied health workforce, but "most critically", in FY24, Amplar delivered 2.3 million health interactions virtually.
Bev said, "The Amplar Health model is very much around saying we accept the physical face-to-face delivery has significant constraints, but how might we be able to better utilize that workforce? And how might we support people to still get access to those services, but through either videoconference or telehealth?
"It's much more cost effective in terms of utilisation. These are obviously very scarce resources in our system. So making sure that they're fully utilised is critical."
The virtual health programs Emma and Bev discussed give space for "optimism" in the sector.
Bev said, "They show the impact that we can have when we talk about taking pressure off the health system, thinking about models differently, rather than anticipating that we need to build a new hospital every month."
