Challenges to the provision of community aged care services across rural Australia: perceptions of service managers

The Australian community aged care sector is facing a growing workforce crisis, particularly in rural and regional areas. Its predominantly female workforce is ageing, and recruiting younger, skilled workers is proving difficult. The service sector, too, is proving highly complex and diverse as a result of contemporary aged care service reforms as well as ongoing difficulties in providing services to the growing numbers of older people living in Australia's rural areas. Despite these multiple challenges, there is a gap in research that explores how rural aged care services manage their day-to-day requirements for skilled workers across the diverse service sector. To address this gap, this article reports on the experiences and perceptions of a small sample of service managers whose organisations represent this diversity, and who are accountable for care provision in regional and rural locations. In such areas, recruitment and skill needs are contoured by disproportionate aged populations, distance and reduced service availability. Eleven service managers were interviewed as part of a larger project that examined the skill and training needs of community aged care workers within the Riverina, a rural region in New South Wales. Qualitative data drawn from semi-structured interviews were thematically analysed to identify the managers' individual needs for workers and skills in the context of location, service parameters and availability of other health and community services. Thematic analysis of the interview data elicited three themes: services, roles and skill deployment; older workers and gendered roles; and barriers to recruitment. The findings illustrate the complexities that characterise the community aged care sector as a whole and the impact of these on individual services located in regional and rural parts of Australia. The participants reported diverse needs for worker skills in keeping with the particular level of service they provide. Significantly, their varying perceptions and practices reflect their preference for older, female workers; their reluctance to take on younger workers is negatively skewed by a lack of capacity to compete for, recruit and retain such workers and to offer incentives in the form of enhanced roles and career development. The findings highlight the conceptual ambiguities inherent in definitions of community aged care work as broadly skilled and uniformly sought across the sector. On the one hand, demands for more and b