Concern for future rest-home capacity

Otago faces a "massive wave" of elderly needing rest-home space that might not be available, if cost-cutting forces rest-homes out of business, New Zealand Aged Care Association board member Malcolm Hendry says.

Mr Hendry, chief executive of Mosgiel's Birchleigh Residential Care Centre, said the baby-boom population blip would start to be felt as early as 2016.

Cost cuts which forced rest-homes out of business were "short-sighted", as gaining consent and building new capacity was enormously expensive, up to $100,000 a bed, he said.

Mr Hendry said many providers were fearful of Otago District Health Board moves to keep referrals down, to cut costs.

ODHB board member Richard Thomson said it was inevitable some rest-homes might be forced out of business, or have to reduce beds, but the DHB could not prevent that.

A positive might be that more stringent times would make the sector competitive, helping to ensure high quality.

It was significant, however, that some aged-care providers were increasing rest-home capacity, even in the current climate, Mr Thomson saidHe acknowledged some big aged-care providers which had retirement villages used rest-homes as a "loss leader", giving them an advantage.

If more rest-home beds were needed in future, he was confident the industry would step up to meet a need when it arose.

Occupancy rates for aged residential care in Otago early last month show that while the overall occupancy rate was 88%, at least 14 centres had rates below this.

In recent months, some ODHB members have expressed concern that as occupancy rates drop there is a risk of a drop in quality of care as centres come under financial pressure.

Staff have advised that the board, while unable to directly influence the number of beds, will have a monitoring regime to ensure declining occupancy does not translate into declining quality.

Figures from early February which are to be presented to today's Otago and Southland disability support advisory committee show one Otago centre had an occupancy rate between 51% and 55% Of the 45 Otago centres, only 16 had a 96% to 100 % rate.

The statistics covered a total of 1971 beds classed as rest-home, hospital, dementia, or psychogeriatric and showed 240 beds were empty in Otago.

The 199 dementia beds had the lowest level of occupancy, at 84%, closely followed by rest-homes (85%), where only 995 of the available 1169 beds were taken.

The break-down of occupancy rates of the various facilities did not specify the type or size of the centres involved.

In Southland the overall occupancy was slightly higher at 89%.

There, dementia beds showed a 79% occupancy rate and rest-homes 87%.

In both provinces 95% of hospital level beds were occupied.