Australia will need to double its aged-care stocks in the next 12 to 15 years or risk a national health care disaster, according to one of the leading experts in the field.
No one seems to be able to understand the depth of the problem or what is needed to remedy it, according to LDK Seniors’ Living founder and director Paul Browne.
“What’s going to happen is everyone will be forced to stay at home when they’re old and frail, living in particularly inappropriate housing,” Browne said.
“They’ll be falling down stairs, breaking hips, breaking pelvises … we are going to have every corridor in every hospital within seven to 10 years chockers with seniors, who should never have been living in their current environment, but are there because nothing appropriate has been built.”
Browne describes himself and his company as “major disrupters” in the sector.
The major disrupter has been involved in aged care and seniors living for the past 25 years, moving into the sector after he saw the way in which his own mother spent the last months and years of her life.
He said the blame for the current state of seniors living can be laid squarely at the feet of government and its interference in the sector back in the 1950s.
“They decided to bring in a range of capital grants programs, which for decades were only available to not-for-profit organisations,” he said.
“What that did was to shut the profit sector—the entrepreneurs, the innovators—out of the industry.
“So, we saw aged care, what we call nursing homes today, evolve pretty much exclusively at the hands of the not-for-profit organisations.”
Browne, who last year sold a half-stake in LDK to Anglicare Sydney, will be one of the guest speakers at The Urban Developer Aged Care and Retirement Living vSummit on March 23.
He admits he is pessimistic.
“I guess the message I’ll be delivering is that we’re heading for a national health care disaster,” he said.
“Part of the problem is that the property developers in the early days came into the retirement village industry and as they morphed into bigger players they wanted nothing to do with aged care.
“In fact, they’re terrified of it.
“And the Royal Commission has only made it worse, further terrorising anybody from actually thinking, ‘Oh, well, we should be doing senior living with services right up to palliative care’.”
That’s the model LDK has adopted—the letters stand for Love, Decency and Kindness—retirement and aged care in one product. A client only has to move from the family home once.
LDK will open Amberfield seniors living community in Yarralumla in about 12 months. It will be their third village and bring to about 1000 the number of homes they have in Canberra and Sydney.
They have about $100 million in pre-sales.
But Browne’s fear is that other aged-care operators are not building new stock.
“Everyone’s off nursing homes,” he said. “The government, the Department of Health and Aged Care, the press, everyone down to their own clientele hates nursing homes, so they are on a hiding to nothing, absolutely nothing.
“The problem is we’ve got 300,000 people living in nursing homes, where no one’s making any money, and it’s not profitable to build any more.
“And yet we need a doubling of our aged-care stock built.”
The Urban Developer Aged Care and Retirement Living vSummit will take place on Thursday, March 23. Click here to register.
