Older Australians make up almost half of all hospital admissions and more than half of all patient days in the health system, yet there’s never been a consistent way to measure whether the care they receive genuinely improves their quality of life, rather than just their clinical results. A new study from Flinders University is setting out to change that.

The research team is developing the first quality-of-life measure specifically designed for Australians aged 65 and over receiving subacute care – the rehabilitation-style services that help people recover after an illness or injury and transition safely back home or into ongoing care.

Why existing measures fall short

Lead researcher Dr Jenny Cleland, from Flinders University’s College of Health and Enablement, says the project addresses a genuine gap in how healthcare is currently evaluated for older patients. Most existing quality-of-life measures focus narrowly on clinical health, when older people themselves consistently point to other things – independence, social connection, emotional wellbeing and the ability to keep doing meaningful activities – as being just as important to their overall wellbeing.

Crucially, this measure is being built differently from the outset: developed together with older people, rather than designed for them and applied afterward. The research team will conduct in-depth interviews with older patients before testing and validating the new tool with hundreds of people currently receiving subacute care.

Building on work already in use across the country

This isn’t the research team’s first attempt at solving this problem. The project builds on earlier work that produced the Quality of Life-Aged Care Consumers measure, now already used in the Australian Government’s National Aged Care Quality Indicator Program across more than 2,700 residential aged care homes nationally. This new study extends that same approach into the hospital and rehabilitation setting, aiming to track quality of life consistently as older Australians move between hospital, subacute care and aged care services.

Senior investigator Professor Julie Ratcliffe, from Flinders’ Caring Futures Institute, says older Australians regularly move between these different parts of the health system, yet until now there’s been no consistent way to track whether that journey is actually improving their quality of life along the way.

What it could mean down the track

Once developed and validated, the researchers intend for the measure to be used in health service planning and funding decisions, helping ensure resources genuinely go toward the care models and approaches that make a real difference to people’s lives, rather than being distributed based on clinical measures alone.

For older Australians and their families navigating the health and aged care system, the ambition is a simple one: a consistent way of making sure the system is genuinely listening to what matters most to the people actually receiving the care, not just tracking the numbers that are easiest to measure.

The study protocol has been published in the journal BMC Geriatrics, with the project supported by an NHMRC Investigator Grant awarded to Professor Ratcliffe.