New online resource to improve care quality monitoring for older people

The Australian Consortium for Aged Care (ACAC) has launched a freely accessible online resource to support the measurement and evaluation of the quality of care that older people experience.

The ACAC Quality Indicator Repository is designed to help researchers, health and aged care providers, government bodies, and families of older Australians better understand and track care quality.

Developed with funding from the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), the resource is the result of a three-year project led by the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) Research Centre based at SAHMRI, and the Caring Futures Institute at Flinders University.

Quality indicators are key measures used worldwide to monitor the safety, effectiveness, efficiency, equity, person-centredness, and timeliness of care. While current Australian health and aged care reforms aim to improve service delivery nationwide, ROSA Director, Professor Maria Inacio says evaluation is critical.

“These reforms require efforts to monitor and assess their impact and having a resource like the ACAC Quality Indicator Repository allows us to see the breadth of available measures, their characteristics, and how they can be applied to undertake these evaluations,” Prof Inacio said.

To create the repository, ACAC conducted a series of scoping literature reviews between 2022 and 2025, identifying indicators across eight key care settings where older people receive care: residential aged care, home care, palliative care, care transitions, dementia care, rural and remote care, rehabilitation care, primary care, and hospital care.

The first of these reviews, examining quality indicators for care transitions, was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. The full repository currently includes 1,326 quality indicators across six care settings, with more to be added in late 2025.

“The release of the ACAC Quality Indicator Repository is an important step in addressing longstanding calls for an evidence-based framework to measure and improve the experiences of older Australians,” Prof Inacio said.

Moving forward, ACAC will collaborate with clinical, consumer, industry, and academic experts to refine the repository and develop a national framework for high-quality care.

The project is a joint effort involving researchers from ROSA, Flinders University, Macquarie University, the University of Queensland, the University of South Australia, the University of New South Wales, and the Australian Dementia Network Registry. Digital agency Mango Chutney developed the repository’s online platform.