Minister for Aged Care visits Morayfield

In early March, our senior executive met with the Minister for Aged Care, Senator the Hon Richard Colbeck, and the member for Longman, Terry Young MP, when they visited Rockpool Aged Care at Morayfield.

The Minister’s visit coincided with a meeting of the Caboolture Residential Aged Care Collaborative, a Brisbane North PHN initiative that enables a collaborative approach to problem solving in the local residential aged care sector.

Minister Colbeck spoke about the findings of the Royal Commission and the government’s intention to support good providers to continue to deliver quality aged care. He acknowledged that while many older Australians did not necessarily want to enter residential aged care, the population was ageing, resulting in higher demand for services.

“So encouraging good providers is really important for us and from my own view, it’s about the systems that promote that,” Minister Colbeck said. “I’m not here to design what an aged care facility looks like. I’m not here to tell people specifically what to do.

"But there are certain indicators that are important for me, for government, for prospective residents in broader community to see and understand, to demonstrate to them that what we say we’re going to do, we are actually doing it,” he said.

The Minister later took questions from the audience and showed strong interest in Brisbane North PHN’s collaborative initiatives aimed enhancing healthcare for people with dementia.

Image: At Rockpool Residential Aged Care (RAC) on 12 March 2020 were (L-R) Terry Young MP, PHN Deputy CEO Libby Dunstan; Rockpool RAC Executive Chairman Bill Summers and Chief Financial Officer Michael Watson, Senator Richard Colbeck, Rockpool RAC General Manager Loretta Creevey, and PHN Executive Manager for Aged and Community Care Michele Smith.