Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) – accessing care minutes targets in the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal

Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC – Accessing care minutes targets – My Aged Care Service and Support Portal  

Welcome to this training video, which is part of a series of videos that will provide you with guidance on how to use some of the key features in the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal.

In this short video, we will:

• provide you with a brief overview of care minutes and
• show you where to find Care Minutes information in the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal.

To start with a brief overview, this slide shows two core components of care minutes.

First, the calculation of care minutes targets

The top part of this slide shows how total care minutes and registered nurse care minutes are calculated.

For each day a service was operational in the quarter, the system calculates the total care minutes and registered nurse care minutes for each resident who was in care that day based on their AN-ACC class. This includes residents in both permanent and respite care.

The minutes for each resident are multiplied by the number of days the resident was in care during the quarter and summed for all residents to derive the total care minutes and registered nursing care minutes requirements for the quarter.

The average care minute targets are then calculated by dividing the total care minutes and registered nurse care minutes by the total number of days of care that the facility delivered for all residents in the quarter.

Note:

• only the residents with classes based on an AN-ACC assessment are included in the calculation – that is, residents with a ‘default class’ at the time of  calculation are not included; and
• Residents who are on leave are included in the calculation because they are considered to be in care.

Second – the delivery of care minutes targets

The bottom half of this slide shows how that average care minute targets for your facility for each quarter will be based the resident casemix of the previous quarter.

To help demonstrate what we mean, we have a simple example here (in the dark blue boxes) showing:

• that a facility’s care minutes from the October – December quarter becomes its targets for the January – March quarter.
• Or in other words, October – December is the calculation period for the facility’s care minutes targets based on the resident casemix, which the facility then delivers against in the January – March quarter. 

This means that any changes to the facility’s resident casemix during the quarter that targets are being delivered will not result in a change to the care minutes target for that quarter.

How to view Care Minute Targets in the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal?

You can view care minutes targets for the previous quarter for each facility in the Portal.

In order to find this, you will need to take the following actions:

Once you have logged in to the portal, click on the Reports and Documents tile from the landing page

You can also click on the reports and documents tab from the top navigation menu.

• From there, click on the Care Minutes tab under the reports and documents heading.
• This will open up your Care Minutes summary and show your average care minutes per resident per day on the right of your screen.

Total care minutes indicates the average care minutes to be provided per resident per day for the facility. This is based on the average assessed AN-ACC casemix for your facility for the previous quarter.

Registered Nurse or RN care minutes indicate the average registered nursing care minutes to be provided per resident per day for your facility.

To filter on the target Care Minutes per year, please use the Financial Year Selector to view the history from the relevant year.

Care Minute targets are updated after the end of each quarter. In the future you can view care minute targets for previous quarters by selecting the purple ‘Care Minute History’ button.

Care Minutes Reporting

Only the worked hours of registered nurses, enrolled nurses and personal care staff will count towards the care minutes target when they are providing personal care to residents, in line with the Royal Commission’s recommendation.

This does not imply that other roles are of lesser value to residents. It simply reflects the Royal Commission’s assessment that personal care directed at Activities of Daily Living needed to be increased.

 Each quarter, you are required to report on the direct care labour and costs in the Quarterly Financial Report (or QFR).

This information is used by the department to review your facility’s performance against your AN-ACC casemix adjusted targets which will also feed into the Star Ratings system that will be published each quarter commencing December 2022.

We will be looking closely at provider reporting to ensure only legitimate care time is counted towards the targets.

We will also be using the various data available on staff costs and time from the Aged Care Financial Report and Quarterly Financial Report to:

• monitor care minutes reporting and identify discrepancies or questionable patterns that or suggest that inaccurate information has been reported or
• non-care activities are being counted as care minutes for the purpose of meeting the targets.

It is your responsibility to ensure that an appropriate record system is in place to accurately capture the hours worked of staff employed in hybrid roles for QFR reporting purposes.

There is additional information and guidance available on care minute reporting, including the QFR guides, the Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs, register and QFR definitions on the Forms Administration home page.

There is also a set of videos available to help you with your care minutes reporting into the Quarterly Financial Report.

You can find more information about how to access your Care Minutes on the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal in the System User Guide which is available from the Department of Health and Aged Care website. Simply search for ‘provider portal user guide’.

If you need any more information, there are lots of ways to get help

• You can watch past webinars
• You could cubscribe to the newsletter to always be up to date
• You could engage with fact feeds on the aged care funding reform website
• or you can ask questions by emailing us at acfr@health.gov.au

Thank you