It is therefore unsurprising that communication emerged as the most common risk identified during the surveys. Across many facilities, staff continued to rely on shared mobile phones, annunciator panels or manual escalation processes that provided limited assurance that information had reached the right person at the right time. 

Delays were rarely the result of poor clinical practice; more often they reflected systems that had become progressively more difficult to adapt to contemporary workflows.

From fragmented information to coordinated care

The surveys revealed a similar story in relation to operational visibility. Many organisations still depend on spreadsheets, manual audits and retrospective reporting to understand response times and identify trends. These approaches undoubtedly provide useful information, but they do so only after significant administrative effort. More importantly, they offer limited opportunities to intervene before small operational issues begin to affect resident care or staff workload.

The good news is that providers do not need to wait for a major technology project to understand where the problems are. The first step can be as simple as walking the site with the people who use these systems every day. Mapping how a resident call or urgent message moves through the facility, can reveal where staff rely on workarounds, switch between devices or lack confidence that information has reached the right person.

Bringing the nurse call expert, communications provider, a clinical technology specialist and internal IT team into the assessment can help identify infrastructure, coverage, escalation and reporting gaps. A site was can also provide an opportunity to see how systems perform in practice, rather than relying solely on what they were designed to do. Thereafter, the findings can then be used to prioritise the issues creating the greatest risk or workload, while providing a practical foundation for longer-term investment.

Falls prevention highlighted another important shift in the sector. Traditional monitoring technologies remain widely used, yet many providers reported challenges associated with false alarms, alert fatigue and limited resident location awareness. These findings reinforce an increasingly important principle in aged care: generating more alerts does not necessarily create safer care. Information only becomes valuable when it helps staff make better decisions, prioritise effectively and respond with confidence.

What emerged most clearly from the surveys was not a catalogue of individual technology and operational issues, but a picture of organisations working exceptionally hard to overcome the limitations of systems and processes supporting them. Across the facilities visited, staff continued to deliver compassionate, responsive care despite systems that required additional manual processes, duplicated communication or workarounds developed through experience.