Four consultancy firms that were paid more than $40m to audit quality and safety in aged care homes have had reports rejected because they did not meet the standard required by the federal government.
The aged care quality and safety commissioner, Janet Anderson, has told a Senate inquiry the firms were “held to account” for their work and that there is an ongoing review about whether to rely on them as heavily in the future.
Last financial year, the federal government outsourced more than two-thirds of aged care audits to external consultants due to workforce challenges, which prompted an official review to warn this posed a “significant risk”.
The four consultancy firms contracted to audit aged care homes were KPMG, SAI Global, RSM and HDAA. Since 2021, these firms have been paid more than $40m for this work, which includes conducting interviews and searches at aged care homes.
Anderson told the inquiry that her staff “have had occasion to work closely with these workforce suppliers to ensure that they understood exactly what we required of them”.
“There have been instances where we have declined to accept one of their reports and have required that they undertake further work on it in order to meet our quality benchmarks,” Anderson told the inquiry.
“I think that the public purse needs to be efficiently spent, and we were determined, and continue to be determined, to get the best possible quality from them.”
The consultants performed more than 1,000 audits across the country, according to the commission. This was due to a significant backlog created by the pandemic, when it was not possible for staff to visit aged care homes.
“We were not able to source sufficient numbers of quality assessors and ensure that they were adequately trained and supervised ourselves,” Anderson said. “In the interests of moving as quickly through the backlog as we could, we approached the market.”
But the increasing reliance on consultants was criticised by former senior public servant, David Tune, who conducted an independent review of the commission’s capability in July.
“I consider this is a core function of the commission and that the high proportion of assessments undertaken by third-party provider assessors represents a significant risk for the commission,” Tune’s report said.
“As deeds of offer with third-party suppliers are reviewed, the commission should seek to reach a better balance to ensure more activity is brought in-house and undertaken by its permanent quality assessor workforce.”
The commission needed to create a new quality assurance team to work with the consultants, providing additional support to ensure they could complete the work at an appropriate standard.
“We held the organisations to account for the quality of the work that was undertaken by the people they employed,” Anderson said.
“I would be fairly confident that there were instances for each of those suppliers. This is relatively specialised work. We have high standards.”
Anderson revealed the commission was seriously considering whether to continue using consultants.
“Using this additional workforce allows us to use our quality assessors within the commission on risk-based work. We are very keen to do more of that as it has become available to us by virtue of having the expanded workforce,” Anderson said.
When asked by Greens senator Jane Rice about when the commission would make a decision about outsourcing, Anderson said “some commercial considerations will come into play”.
“I expect that we will be determining that towards the end of the first quarter next year, so quarter three of financial year 2023-24,” Anderson said.
Beth Vincent-Pietsch, the deputy secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, has previously said the Tune review made it clear that change was required.
“David Tune’s capability review makes it glaringly clear that the third party provider program should be abandoned and Australian public service staff need to be brought in to take over the core work of the commission,” Vincent-Pietsch said.
