Monte stalled at green light
MONTEFIORE Randwick’s proposed expansion has been approved, but the project is far from starting as the aged care home’s board waits on information from the Government.
MONTEFIORE Randwick’s proposed expansion has been approved, but the project is far from starting as the aged care home’s board waits on information from the Government.
The NSW Department of Planning rubber-stamped the development, which will eventually result in the campus’s number of beds increase from 276 to more than 500 in late July.
But Montefiore president David Freeman said this week that potential changes to federal aged care legislation had put the brakes on a feasibility study the home was conducting into the first stage of the development, a 90-bed dementia-specific facility.
“Realistically, until we have legislative certainty about what we can charge [residents] and so forth, it’s difficult to do a complete feasibility study as you can imagine,” Freeman said.
One of the recommended reforms in the recently released Productivity Commission report, Caring for Older Australians, is for those receiving care to “contribute, in part, to their costs of care (with a maximum lifetime limit) and meet their accommodation and living expenses (with safety nets for those of limited means)”.
The Government has received those recommendations but is yet to act on them.
“If the Productivity Commission recommendations are accepted, the cost of care and the subsidies from the Government will remain reasonably similar,” Freeman said. “But the big reform is in being able to charge for the accommodation component.
“If the legislative reforms allow us to charge a greater fee or retain some part of the bond, then obviously that will impact on the feasibility and therefore the amount of equity that the home would need to inject into the project.”
Freeman said the latter, equity, would be the other significant issue to address. “The first stage in our assessed costs at this juncture is approximately $40 million, so it’s clearly a very large project, and the community’s support in terms of bequests, so forth, are encouraged obviously, so that we can do it in a fiscally responsible way,” he said.
And while he was unable to give a timeframe when work would begin, Freeman said he was eager to see the first stage go ahead.
“This particular first building is a dementia-specific building, which is what we promised we would build next at our last capital appeal, and we are very keen to provide that building as quickly as we can, but within the confines of responsible project funding,” he said.
GARETH NARUNSKY
An artist’s impression of the Montefiore development
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