2026 and 95% of operators are looking in the rear view mirror

Aged care is running out of road. The care economy already consumes 8% of GDP and 16% of Australia’s workforce in the face of massive increases in demand. Aged care (and village) operators are heading for a car crash, and soon, says Chris Blake.

It’s why, for the six months since the New Aged Care Act was scheduled to come in, we’ve been pushing Plan T – the transformation agenda the sector must lead itself. Not because anyone wants more reform, but because the system genuinely needs a redesign to meet what’s ahead.

This week, St Vincent’s Health Australia CEO Chris Blake (pictured below) draws the sharpest line yet. On current settings, Australia’s health and aged care system is “unfundable within five years.”

This isn’t politics. It’s maths. Straight-line planning is finished.

More Australians are living longer with chronic disease. Dementia is accelerating. The workforce is exhausted. And the funding envelope will not grow at the rate demographic pressure demands.

As DCM Group CEO Chris Baynes observed this week, the sector’s instinctive move has been to pivot into “regulation-light” assisted living and hope the gap between retirement living and home care becomes the safe middle ground.

Chris Blake’s message? That window has closed.

In his interview in this issue of SATURDAY, he lays out a model that flips the entire system: by 2030, half of all St Vincent’s care will be delivered in people’s homes or virtually – hospital-level care, geriatric evaluation, rehab, palliative care, and continuous remote monitoring anchored to hospital hubs but delivered where people actually live.

This is what real transformation looks like – not another marginal new product.

And it’s the blueprint every operator should now be studying.

It also forces us back to what’s been missing in every debate about hospital congestion, bed shortages and aged care supply: prevention.

Editorially, we have concluded the only way to solve the pressure on all sections of the care and health environment is to improve the ‘wellness’ of older people before they need care. It is not only the prevention of physical decline but also addressing mental health, particularly loneliness.

Many talk about it but there is little action in a world where increasing acuity is rewarded by increasing response. Financially, and with physical attention (workforce).

Earlier intervention that delays requiring an aged care bed by six months reduces the demand for the total number of beds by 25%. Supply of bed problem solved.

And the sleeper issue is dementia.

With lifestyle factors driving major risks, we simply allow people to harm themselves and then we spend hundreds of millions of dollars managing the catastrophic outcomes.

In Denmark by comparison, the law requires every Dane to be assessed for their health and lifestyle at age 75 and have an action plan at 82.

Prevention and early intervention are essential – but that requires a national conversation about ageing well, not just care minutes and funding buckets.

Inspector-General Natalie Siegel-Brown has been clear: aged care will fall off the political boil unless the sector keeps the conversation hot. That means shifting the investment narrative toward prevention, connection and alternatives to the institutional model we’ve inherited.

And it means leadership from providers who know the ageing journey better than anyone – and not waiting for Canberra to engineer a system makeover.

Because, as Chris Blake warns, if we keep designing with the rear-view mirror, we’ll hit what’s coming the other way.

In this issue, we also unveil our Top Strategists – the leaders shaping their own future, not waiting for it – plus our most-read stories of 2025.

If you want to stay ahead of the decade shaping our sector, subscribe to SATURDAY for 2026 – it’s going to be a big one.