Online repository helps understand and track care quality

A freely accessible online repository — the Australian Consortium for Aged Care (ACAC) Quality Indicator Repository — has been launched to support the measurement and evaluation of the quality of care that older people experience. Designed to help health and aged care providers, government bodies, researchers and families of older Australians better understand and track care quality, the resource was developed with funding from the Medical Research Future Fund and is the result of a three-year project led by the Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) Research Centre based at SAHMRI and the Caring Futures Institute at Flinders University.

As current Australian health and aged care reforms aim to improve service delivery nationwide, quality indicators can be used as an evaluation method. Quality indicators that are key measures used worldwide to monitor the effectiveness, efficiency, equity, person-centredness, safety and timeliness of care. 

“These reforms require efforts to monitor and assess their impact, and having a resource like the ACAC Quality Indicator Repository allows us to see the breadth of available measures, their characteristics, and how they can be applied to undertake these evaluations,” ROSA Director Professor Maria Inacio said.

Between 2022 and 2025, ACAC conducted a series of scoping literature reviews to develop the Quality Indicator Repository; reviews that identified indicators across eight key care settings where older people receive care. These settings were:

• aged care
• care transitions
• dementia care
• hospital care
• palliative care
• primary care
• rehabilitation care
• rural and remote care
   

Care transitions was the first of these quality indicator reviews, published in 2025 in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. Currently, the full repository includes 1326 quality indicators across six care settings, with more to be added in late 2025. ACAC will collaborate with clinical, consumer, industry and academic experts to refine the repository and develop a national framework for high-quality care.

Researchers from ROSA, Flinders University, Macquarie University, the University of Queensland, the University of South Australia, the University of New South Wales and the Australian Dementia Network Registry were involved in the project. “The release of the ACAC Quality Indicator Repository is an important step in addressing longstanding calls for an evidence-based framework to measure and improve the experiences of older Australians,” Inacio said.

The Quality Indicator Repository can be accessed at agedcareconsortium.com.au/quality-indicators.

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