What are Star Ratings for residential aged care?

What is the Star Rating System?

The Star Ratings system is an Australian Government initiative to support older Australians and their representatives to make informed choices about their aged care services. The Australian Government assesses the quality of care at all government-funded aged care homes. Based on these assessments, each home receives a Star Rating as a simple way of showing information about the quality of care they provide and how they compare to other homes. 

The Star Ratings System, introduced by the Australian Government and available on My Aged Care since December 2022, is designed to support informed choices about aged care services.  

All government funded aged care homes receive a star rating based on an assessment by the Australian Government of the quality of care provided. This offers older Australians and representatives the ability to easily compare homes on the quality of care provided.   

At Estia Health we are committed to continually improving the quality of care and services for our residents. We work cooperatively with government and aged care regulators to implement the ongoing reform program in aged care. We also understand the essential role that we play in meeting the growing need for older Australians to have access to high quality, safe and affordable residential aged care. 

What are the benefits of Star Ratings and what do they mean?

The Australian Government implemented Star Ratings were created as a response to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The Commission highlighted the need for older Australians and their representatives to be able to compare and measure service quality simply and transparently.  

Star Ratings provide:

• A greater understanding of how each residential aged care home is performing
• The ability to benchmark against other homes using nationally consistent quality measures
• The opportunity to see the results of continuous improvement activities through improved Star Ratings
• The opportunity to showcase a home’s performance and the quality of care residents are provided.

When you use the Find a Provider tool on the My Aged Care website to check an aged care home’s Star Rating, you’ll see an overall Star Rating between 1 and 5 stars. More stars means an aged care home is delivering higher quality care across the four key areas of performance. 

What are the Star Ratings based on?

The Star Ratings are based on four areas that are important to older Australians and their families when making a choice about residential aged care: 

• Quality Indicators (15%): how an aged care service performs on a relative basis against five different quality indicators. 

• Service Compliance (30%): performance assessed by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission against the clinical and quality standards which apply to all providers. 

• Resident Experience (33%):  scores based on interviews conducted by an independent assessor with at least 10% of older Australians living in residential aged care about their overall experience at their aged care home. 
• Staffing Minutes (22%): information about clinical staffing levels against targets set by the Department of Health and Aged Care, which apply from October 2023. 

 

Here’s what each indicator means: 

Service Compliance:

A residential aged care home that receives a one-star compliance rating (which would occur if it was sanctioned or found to be punishing anyone who complained to the commission) will receive an overall one-star rating regardless of how they perform in other sub-categories. 

Homes that receive a two-star compliance rating (if they were issued a compliance notice under the current system) cannot receive an overall star rating higher than two stars regardless of how they perform in other sub-categories. 

Compliance:

The compliance rating – is the responsibility of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and provides information on the extent to which a residential aged care service is meeting its responsibilities, including the Aged Care Quality Standards – can change any day depending on the findings of the commission. 

Staffing:

Rather than having staff ratios in aged care, the focus is on care minutes provided by registered nurses, enrolled nurses and personal care workers, which align to the care required by each individual in care. 

A new funding model in place for aged care requires homes to meet a minimum average care minute target of 200 minutes a day, including 40 minutes of registered nurse time, from October 1, 2022. This target will become mandatory from October 1, 2023 for all aged care homes, and increase to 215 minutes, including 44 registered nurse minutes, from October 1, 2024.

Resident experiences:

Once a year all government-funded aged care homes will have an independent surveying team visit to survey 10% of the home’s residents. The aim of this program is to gather important feedback from residents about their lived experiences of care, culture, food and management within the home.  

To learn more about the survey, visit My Aged Care. 

Estia Health remains continually committed to improving and listening to our residents and their families. We aim to survey 100% of our residents twice a year through our own Customer Experience Survey program, to hear and learn from their feedback. 

Importantly during 2021-22, the Estia Health residents’ and families’ satisfaction rate was 93.2%. In the 12-month period, we received 8112 survey responses from across our homes. 

Moving into age care is a big decision, so we highly recommend and encourage all future residents, family members and carers to book a tour of the home that you are interested in and see how Estia Health can look after your loved one.