Recognising the importance of providing people with better information upon which to make a decision the Government has introduced Consumer Experience Reports (CER) for the residential aged care setting. Designed to provide information gathered from people about their experience living in the facility around areas considered important for quality of life, CERs are also planned for home- and community-based care settings.
Consumer Experience Reports
Residential aged care: When assessors from the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (the Commission) visit an aged care facility as part of a re-accreditation audit they are required to interview at least one in ten of the people living in the facility. From 1 July 2017 these interviews have included a set of structured questions designed to collect data about the person’s experience of the quality of care and services delivered within each facility. The results from all the interviews in the facility are compiled and published as a Consumer Experience Report (CER) alongside the published audit report (Find a Report). A sample copy of a CER (540kb pdf) is also available for a facility.
The reports are based on 10 questions, for which responses are collected either on a scale ranging from 'never to always' or a scale ranging from 'strongly disagree - strongly agree'. The Commission has published the results (967kb pdf) combining all facilities for the year 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2018 covering more than 15,000 residents in over 1,100 facilities. As part of this the La Trobe University was commissioned to undertake a detailed analysis of the CER report data (1.73MB pdf) from 2017-18.
Home- and community based care: Consumer Experience Reports in home and community care are currently being developed. The literature review to identify key areas concerning choice and quality in community care has been completed and pilot testing commenced in November 2018. [1]
Themes identified by the literature review related either to how consumers choose to spend their budgets, or what consumers value in their packaged home- and community-based services. More specifically the important themes were:
- Control (active decision making)
- Interpersonal interaction (receiving services from someone they know)
- Flexibility (in relation to provider, choice, responsiveness to changing needs)
- Local residence (receive care at their place of residence)
- Affordability
- Administrative and financial literacy (need for support to understand options)
- Safety (security and availability of assistance), and
- Timeliness of service care provision.
Page updated 16 December 2021