Consumer Magazine Gets It Wrong on Rest Homes

Consumer Magazine in its latest article, “The majority of rest homes are falling short” has fundamentally misunderstood how regulations in the health sector work, says the New Zealand Aged Care Association.

Consumer Magazine implies that if a rest home does not fully attain all 60 Health and Disability (Safety) standards in an independent audit, they are providing poor care. That is totally incorrect, says NZACA Chief Executive Martin Taylor.

“By Consumer Magazine’s logic, if someone sits a maths test and achieves only 98%, then they’ve failed. That’s the fundamental error in the thinking on which their article is based.”

Using their logic, all Government hospitals are ‘falling short’ as none has ever achieved 100% attainment with the Health and Disability (Safety) standards,” Mr Taylor said.

Consumer Magazine needs to improve its understanding of the Health and Disability (Safety) Act 2001, under which all health services in New Zealand are certified as safe to operate. The main purpose of the Act is to “promote the safe provision of health and disability services to the public and… encourage providers of health and disability services to the public to improve continuously the quality of those services”.

To achieve this purpose health services are certificated to operate based on how well they are achieving against those 60 standards.

No health service in New Zealand is allowed to operate unless they are certified and they cannot be certified unless they can provide a safe health service.

“A health service does not have to fully attain all standards before they are safe to operate because the standards are not a floor – they are a very high ceiling, which is why only 10% of aged care providers have reached this goal and why no government run hospital have ever done so,” Mr Taylor said.

As set out in the legislation, the level of standard attainment determines how long a provider can be certified to operate before they are required to undergo another audit. Certification lengths are 1, 2, 3 and 4 years and audits are undertaken prior to the expiry of a certification period as well as midway through a certification period. Therefore, if a provider is certified for two years, they will be required to have had a planned audit before the two year period begins and they will have a spot audit sometime around the end of their first year.

Four years Certification for a health provider is seen as excellent, three years is good, two years needs to improve. Only one year or less is not good and the health service needs to be watched closely. One year or less ‘provisional’ relates to a new facility or a facility that has new owners.

The table below compares the Certification lengths between aged residential care providers and DHB hospitals.
Certification Length

(From MOH website) Aged Care Facility

(% of all facilities) DHB Hospital Facilities

(% of all facilities)
1 year or less provisional (new provider) 41(6%) 0
1 year or less 6 (1%) 0
2 years 119 (18%) 38 (45%)
3 years 428 (65%) 45 (55%)
4 years 69 (10%) 0
Grand Total 663 83

Mr Taylor said: “NZACA fully supports this system where striving for 100% excellence is hard to attain because it creates an environment of continuous improvement which is the whole purpose of the Act. Having 10% of aged care facilities fully attaining the standards is exceptionally good and the sector should be applauded for this achievement.”

ends

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