St Vincent’s CEO Chris Blake proposes radical aged care funding solution
More money won’t fix the problems in the aged care sector, the CEO of Australia's largest Not For Profit health and aged care provider has told the 2026 LEADERS SUMMIT.
Instead, siloed funding should instead be tied to the needs of the individual, according to Chris Blake.
The first guest speaker at the SUMMIT today (Tuesday 24 March) said that when St Vincent’s embarked on its transformation three years ago, it set out to address significant problems in the healthcare sector: an ageing population, equity in access to services, and workforce shortages.
The provider developed the hub and spoke model, announced last December, in which hospital precincts act as hubs, with aged care homes, retirement villages and home-based services as the spokes, tied back to centralised clinical oversight.
Within five years, St Vincent's plans to deliver 50% of their interactions outside traditional healthcare settings.
Disrupt funding
Chris said the aged care system must move away from simply seeking more money from Government to solve the sector’s problems. Instead, he proposed the sector seeks permission to mix funding from different elements of the healthcare system.
For example, a person in the aged care system is likely to be attracting Medicare funding, aged care funding, they might have private health insurance, PBIS funding, and state-funded hospital care.
“Those funding sources are so committed to ensuring that the funding doesn’t get mixed, that a very large proportion of that gets lost in the cracks,” Chris said.
“What we might need is not new policy, but new permissions to mix funding, with a model based not on silos, but on the person in the aged care system.”
Key to that reform would be linking information in individual healthcare records across the healthcare system. Currently, individual healthcare information records are locked in unconnected hospital and aged care systems.
“If you could mix the funding, if you could integrate the information around that person across those different incidences of care, you could build a healthcare model around high acuity care nurses working at the top of their scope in that site, connecting to the local, community-based healthcare,” Chris said.
“It would be a lower cost model, I have no doubt about that,” he said.
Tech innovation key
Having taken St Vincent’s executive team to India and Singapore to observe their technology and aged care systems, Chris said Australia’s technology is behind that of operators overseas.
He gave the example of a person in Florida, US, being remotely monitored in Hyderabad, India. They will receive care faster than a nurse who is meeting their minimum care minutes sitting in a nurse’s station in Australia, Chris said.
A platform for reform
As a microcosm of the healthcare system, St Vincent’s is advocating for new models of care and seeking to partner with other health and aged care organisations.
Chris has outlined a future vision for aged care. Will other operators get on board, or use these ideas as a foundation for their own innovations?
