NEW ZEALAND | Workforce shortages and increasingly complex care needs are shaping healthcare providers’ expectations of the next three to five years. BNZ’s latest research raises a question relevant to aged care: how far can existing services adapt before providers need to change the way care is delivered?
In findings released last month, four in five private healthcare providers surveyed believed significant change was needed to meet New Zealand’s current and future healthcare needs. Workforce constraints were the leading future concern, identified by 55 percent, followed by increasing complexity of patient needs and expectations at 46 percent.
The research included 106 healthcare providers surveyed online earlier this year. It used a convenience sample and was not representative of healthcare as a whole, so the findings should not be read as an aged care sector measure.
Nevertheless, the relationship between staffing capacity and care complexity gives the research relevance beyond its sample. For aged care operators, technology investment has to be considered against the work staff need to perform and the needs of the residents they support.
BNZ Head of Healthcare Sector Thom McKenzie described providers as expecting technology to play a larger role in the coming years. Recent adoption had concentrated on administrative applications, including note-taking, booking, electronic prescriptions, and task automation.
“Technology use may have dipped, but its importance hasn’t,” said McKenzie.
McKenzie said moving into technology that changed care delivery involved larger decisions about investment, integration, privacy, regulation, and clinical risk. He suggested those demands helped explain why reported use had dipped even as providers expected technology to become more important.
That distinction deserves attention. Reducing administrative work can release staff time, but a change to care delivery also affects professional responsibilities, how information is assessed, and how a service responds when a resident needs assistance.
The commercial assessment therefore extends beyond whether a tool makes an existing task faster. It includes the resources needed to introduce a different service, the responsibilities it creates, and the evidence that it improves care.
For operators, the unresolved issue is how much additional capacity administrative improvements can provide. Investment in a different model of care becomes a more substantial decision when those gains are no longer sufficient for the work ahead.
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