QFR Guide – Care costs and care minutes reporting for Residential Aged Care providers

Welcome to a video presentation that will provide guidance on reporting  care minutes and care costs for residential aged care providers in the Quarterly Financial Report, otherwise known as the QFR.

This video is part of a series that will provide guidance on completing the residential income and expenses section of the QFR.

The new mandatory requirement to provide an average of 200 minutes 

case-mix adjusted care per resident per day will commence on 1 October 2023.

Care minutes are considered the worked hours from Registered Nurses, Enrolled Nurses and Personal Care Workers in nursing.

Registered nurses will be required to deliver a minimum of 40 minutes of care per resident per day.

If you want to know more, please see our fact sheet “What are care minutes?” for further details.

Reporting care minutes is important, as it will inform the department of a facility’s performance against their care minutes targets.

Please see our fact sheets “Why is reporting care staffing minutes important?” and, “How do I calculate my care minutes targets?” to calculate the care minutes targets for your facility.

The care minutes you report will flow through the Star Ratings process and inform the costing studies for the new AN-ACC funding model.

For reporting care expenses for employees, we recommend that you ensure your systems and or processes are in place to capture the care expenses for all health professionals, which excludes their leave and training time.

Having comprehensive rosters and understanding your payroll support options will help to ensure you are well placed to have accurate data to submit in the QFR.

We recommend thorough checking to ensure you have included the appropriate on-costs and excluded leave and training with your reporting.

For reporting care expenses for contracted staff, we recommend that providers work closely with Agency organisations that contract staff to ensure eventual invoices include the required information for the QFR. You can set up your own general ledger or GL codes and ensure invoices are coded to the correct roles.

Please ensure the costs reconcile to the hours worked in the roster and time sheet, and ensure that the hours are recorded from the invoice.

This includes asking for specific data to be included on the Agency’s invoicing information, so the cost in the tax invoice can be validated.

For reporting care expenses for allied health staff, we recommend that invoices include the required information for the QFR. It may be appropriate to set up specific GL codes for allied health roles, to ensure invoices are coded to the correct roles.

It is important to ensure the costs reconcile to the hours worked in the roster and time sheet, and ensure that the hours are recorded from the invoice.

This includes asking for specific data to be included on the invoicing information, so the cost in the tax invoice can be validated.

For reporting labour hours, check the allocation of reporting by job category, such as Registered Nurse, Enrolled Nurse of Personal Care Worker.

Check the hours against rosters or payroll data.

Remember, the worked hours are different to paid hours and do not include training time or staff leave.

For reporting of care minutes, the average hourly rates of pay will include average rates for each staff classification, but exclude penalties, superannuation and on-costs.

The occupied bed days must match the Medicare Statement that you receive.

And please note, that the available bed days exclude off-line beds.

Please note that the formula for the Direct care minutes is Direct Care hours divided by Occupied Bed Days x 60. This is an inbuilt automated calculation to give you a sense check of your direct care minutes results based on the information that have you entered.

This can then be entered into the QFR under the Direct Care Minutes worked per Occupied Bed Day section.

I will now walk you through a worked example of a 40-bed site with 98% occupancy.

The example explains how to calculate bed days for the July-September period, which should match the Medicare statement.

Then using the bed days, this example shows how to calculate the Registered Nurse Care minutes per resident per day.

It might be best if you pause this video here to read through the example, and try it yourself.

Here we have a few tips for when staff cover more than one role.

Using the worked example in the previous slide, for when staff cover more than one role, such as when the care manager who is also a registered nurse, we recommend that the direct care hours for this person are recorded.

You may want to consider apportioning the direct care hours based on the average time spent in each role.

Please note the apportioning of time in care minutes is allowed only for RNs, ENs and PCWs when they perform in hybrid roles.

We recommend having an internal quality assurance process on your own data

As an example, you can do the following:

• Compare the calculated minutes total care funding against the current ACFI funding

The formula we recommend is as follows:

• The total care revenue divided by the total number of occupied bed days
• You can also apply a sense check by asking - does the average care revenue per resident per day align with the minutes of care delivered per day. High care revenue should result in a higher delivery of care time.

The Department is committed to providing support to help you submit quality data in your QFR.

Further information on the QFR, including QFR definitions and Frequently Asked Questions, can be found on the Forms Administration website at Health at health.formsadministration.com.au.

A helpdesk is also available; please send questions to qfr@stewartbrown.com.au.