An analysis by aged care provider Bolton Clarke has found just 800 net new beds have been built in the last year. Ageing Australia chief executive officer Tom Symondson says this is nowhere near what is needed.
Acknowledging that the 800-bed figure refers to net growth, and that of course there is more building going on, “quite a lot of it” is refurbishing existing ones, or consolidating sites, meaning those builds don’t add to the total, Symondson explained.
“And in some cases, providers are decreasing the number of beds on a site, because they’re getting rid of those three or four bedrooms, and replacing it with one or two en suite rooms,” he said.
Symondson said the sector needs to see, on average, 10,000 beds built a year for the next 20 years to meet projected demand.
Occupancy has not reached capacity just yet, but will in the very near future, he warned, adding that it won’t be a case of “all bets are off” if those 10,000 aren’t built each year but the average will go up.
“Instead of building 10,000 a year, we might have to build 12,000 a year or 14,000 a year, and by the time we’re talking those kinds of numbers, we will already be full,” he said.
In some areas, bed shortages have already reached a crisis level, and it is having an impact on the broader health system.
According to the position paper Hospital Bed Blockages and Aged Care Shortages – Impact on Older People by the NSW Ministerial Advisory Council on Ageing, the number of older people occupying hospital beds in NSW beyond their discharge date in July 2025 had risen to 975.
The position paper also pointed to research conducted by MACA member Paul Sadler and Professor Kathy Eagar in the Illawarra Shoalhaven region, which found that on a typical day, an average of 20 per cent of the local health district’s available hospital beds are being used by people who have been approved for placement in an aged care home.
A similar situation exists in South Australia, with data released by SA Health showing that as of 21 October the number of older people waiting in a metropolitan hospital for residential aged care placement has peaked at 296. A further 93 people are waiting for a place in a memory support unit.
“We have to start building more, but we’re not in a position to,” Symondson said. “We just don’t have the access to investment or the margins, and we certainly don’t have government capital funding to build those beds.”
“And so something has to change or we won’t build them, and that’s what we’re seeing.”
Retirement living has a role to play
Retirement living plays a “huge” role in alleviating some of these pressures, Symondson said.
It can’t help the approximately 2500 older people in hospital ready for discharge, he noted, but it can help stop people reaching a point where they require hospital admission.
“A lot of our members, because we have a large number of retirement living members in Ageing Australia, all of the building they are doing is in retirement. It’s not in aged care because they can’t get the money and the investment cases simply don’t stack up,” Symondson said.
“But they are building retirement villages or independent living units or affordable housing for older people.
“We need that increase. We also need to really understand the opportunity to grow that stock.”
But not every older person owns a home, so not every older person can buy into the standard model of a retirement village and the sector needs to look at alternative models, he emphasised.
The retirement living sector is also facing its own challenges, Symondson added, with villages reaching capacity “before you’ve even cut the ribbon,” and complex planning permission making it difficult to build.
“It’s very difficult to get planning permission for residential care… but even more so for retirement villages. They are not something that a lot of councils or even a lot of state governments really understand terribly well, and they’ve got to do a lot more work to fix that,” Symondson said.
“There are zoning issues, in some places it’s not considered in the same way as a standard residential development. There’s no good reason for that – that’s just how it is.”
This story first appeared on Australian Ageing Agenda, a Positive Impact Media publication.