Australia’s aged care sector is under more pressure than it has been in decades. A recent analysis from CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, found the country is short by at least 110,000 direct aged care workers within the next ten years, a gap that could balloon past 400,000 by 2050 without serious intervention. That shortage is landing at the same time as one of the biggest regulatory shake ups the sector has seen, with the Aged Care Act 2024 introducing mandatory 24/7 registered nurse coverage, stricter care minute requirements and a public star rating system for every provider, as confirmed by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
The national peak body Ageing Australia has been blunt about what’s at stake, warning that the reforms “cannot succeed without a well trained and supported workforce” and calling for a coordinated national strategy to close the gap. For large, well resourced operators, meeting these new obligations is difficult enough. For smaller, community specific providers, it’s a different problem altogether.
That’s because culturally specific aged care isn’t just about hitting a staffing ratio. It means finding registered nurses and personal carers who can also run a kosher kitchen, observe Shabbat and Jewish holy days around a resident’s care plan, or sit with a Holocaust survivor in a language and cultural context a generic roster can’t replicate. None of that shows up in a care minutes calculation, and none of it gets easier to staff as the national shortage deepens.
Jewish Care Victoria is one of the organisations trying to hold that model together. Its residential home in Carnegie, the Smorgon Family Building, is built around a “Hand in Hand” model of care that groups residents into small household style clusters rather than a single large ward, with its own synagogue on site. Its Caulfield home, Gary Smorgon House, incorporates the Melbourne Hebrew Memorial Nursing Home and has its own synagogue and dedicated rabbi supporting the regular celebration of Jewish holidays. Alongside residential care, the organisation runs a Holocaust Survivor Support Program, a distinct service model that few mainstream providers are set up to offer at all.
None of this has come cheap. Jewish Care has been running a capital campaign, publicly described as a $200 million investment, covering projects that include its disability respite centre, an active living centre, community housing and a further stage of development on St Kilda Road. That scale of investment is happening at the same time as the rest of the sector is being asked to do more with a shrinking workforce, which makes Jewish Care a useful test case for a question the whole industry is grappling with: whether specialised, community specific models of care can keep expanding while the national worker shortage keeps widening.
That question won’t be settled by one provider or one campaign. But as reform tightens and the workforce gap grows, the aged care providers hardest to replace may not be the biggest ones, but the ones built around something a generic staffing pool can’t easily reproduce. Whether the sector’s next phase makes room for that kind of care, or quietly squeezes it out, is likely to become clearer over the next few years of reform.
