New national framework wants to change how Australia cares for older people — and it starts with one simple idea: ask them what matters

If you have ever accompanied an elderly parent to a GP appointment on Monday, a specialist on Wednesday and a community nurse on Friday – each of whom seemed to be working from a different page – you already understand the problem this new framework is trying to solve.

Older Australians are the largest users of health and aged care services in the country. Many receive care from multiple providers simultaneously – a GP, a hospital outpatient clinic, a home care provider, a pharmacist, a physiotherapist, and in some cases a residential aged care facility – and until now, there has been no consistent, national way of measuring whether all of those providers are actually delivering care that works together in the interests of the person at the centre of it.

That changes today.

What the new framework does

The National Framework for High Quality Person-Centred Care for Older People, launched by the Australian Consortium for Aged Care and developed by researchers from the Registry of Senior Australians Research Centre at SAHMRI and Flinders University, is designed to do something that sounds obvious but has never been done systematically in Australia: measure the quality of care older people receive across the entire journey, not just within individual parts of the system.

“For too long, quality monitoring has focused on individual parts of the system,” said lead researcher Professor Maria Inacio. “This work recognises that people experience care as a whole, and that improving outcomes requires a coordinated, person-centred approach.”

In practical terms, that means a hospital should know what a patient’s GP has prescribed. A home care provider should understand what happened during a recent hospital admission. A residential aged care facility should have a clear picture of a new resident’s full medical history, preferences and goals – not just the paperwork from their last discharge.

The framework does not deliver these connections overnight. What it does is establish, for the first time, a shared national approach to measuring whether they are happening – and where they are not.

The three goals at the heart of the framework

The framework is built around three core goals that, taken together, represent a fundamental shift in how the system thinks about older Australians.

The first is promoting autonomy, independence and wellbeing. This means measuring whether care is actually helping older people maintain their independence and quality of life – not just managing their conditions.

The second is nurturing person-centred care. This is the part that matters most to the people receiving it. Person-centred care means the individual’s preferences, values and goals are at the centre of every decision – not the convenience of the provider, not the limitations of the system, not the default pathway that has always been followed because nobody thought to ask whether there was a better one.

The third is enabling integrated, high-quality care across settings. This addresses the fragmentation problem directly – ensuring that when a person moves between their GP, a hospital, a community service and an aged care facility, the care they receive is coordinated rather than contradictory.

Why this matters to families

Craig Gear, CEO of the Older Persons Advocacy Network, put it plainly.

“Older people don’t experience aged care and health care as separate systems – they experience whether care is safe, respectful and responsive to their needs,” he said. “This framework gives the sector a shared evidence base to identify where reform needs to focus, so that older people’s rights and dignity are reflected in the care they actually receive.”

For families navigating the system – and it is often families, not the older person themselves, who are doing the navigating – the framework offers something that has been missing: accountability. By establishing clear, measurable quality indicators across function, quality of life, cognitive health, access to care, consumer experience and mental wellbeing, it creates a basis for asking whether care is actually working.

Not whether the paperwork has been completed. Not whether the box has been ticked. Whether the person is actually better off.

What happens next

The framework itself does not change anything in a GP’s waiting room or a nursing home corridor tomorrow morning. It is a measurement and monitoring tool – a way of seeing the system clearly so that the right improvements can be made in the right places.

But measurement is where improvement starts. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and until now, Australia has not had a consistent way of seeing how care for older people works across the full journey.

Professor Inacio is clear about what it makes possible.

“By providing a shared, evidence-based approach to measuring quality, we can support providers, policymakers and the sector to identify where improvements are needed and track progress over time,” she said. “This is about making sure that the care older people receive aligns with what matters most to them.”

What matters most to them. That is the phrase worth holding onto. Because for too long, the system has measured what matters most to the system — efficiency, throughput, compliance — and assumed that was enough.

This framework suggests it is time to ask a different question. And the person who should answer it is the one sitting in the waiting room.