Last week we discussed just how big the demand for aged care will be in the coming decades. More than half of all people aged 85 will need some sort of care. This care can be provided by family members or professional aged carers.
Since we are doubling the 85 population in the next 14 years from 586,000 to 1,189,000, we can be sure that the need for aged care workers will grow at roughly the same rate.
That’s a problem, considering the sector is already dramatically understaffed.
But it gets worse. Last year I introduced the concept of the retirement cliff. It’s a simple measure that shows what share of the workforce is already of retirement age and what share is aged between 55 and 64, meaning they will fall off the retirement cliff in about a decade.
Some jobs face steeper retirement cliffs than others.
As the chart below shows, the jobs a typical aged care home relies on face very steep retirement cliffs.
We established that we already have a current shortage of registered aged care nurses, residential care officers, and aged carers; we realised that the future demand for such workers is increasing rapidly; and now we learned that a disproportionately big share of workers will retire in the coming decade. Ouch.
Sadly, we are not done yet.
Things get worse when we look at arguably the most important job in the aged care system – aged carers.
The chart below shows the age profile of the roughly 225,000 aged care workers who were employed in Australia during the 2021 Census.
We see a relatively strong cohort of young care workers in their late teens and early 20s. At first glance this looks promising – have we found the........