Key Points
- Providers across the country, especially in regional areas, are closing beds and even entire facilities due to their inability to attract and retain sustainable care workforces.
- Hundreds of offshore trained Filipino workers are now being deployed by the busload each month to metro and regional Australia.
- Riverina and Illawarra regions are the first to receive hundreds of workers under the new program
- Provider CEOs says it gives hope to local workers and residents with serious numbers of workers settling long term in the bush
- The program leverages the recently announced Aged Care worker visa with long term pathways to permanent residency
- The program gives hope and alleviates poverty to thousands of Filipinos who send money back home to their families
Groworx has partnered with a leading Aged Care provider in an Australian first to design a program to solve the Aged Care worker crisis at scale. The Aged Care sector currently faces a shortage of care workers and nurses, with the number now exceeding 60,000. Many providers are being forced to reduce the number of beds or entire facilities due to the lack of trained workers. This is compounded by the new Government mandate to meet minimum minutes of contact hours per resident from each worker, which will take effect in October 2023.
This lack of care workers and nurses is a global crisis that will only worsen with time. Developed economies do not have enough babies and people are living longer, causing populations to age and creating a need for more care. Countries such as the UK, Canada, and Germany are turning to developing countries like the Philippines to alleviate the problem of care talent.
The unique Groworx program recruits talented Filipino aged care workers and nurses. It trains them offshore in the Australian Aged Care Certificate III qualification before managing their migration and relocation onshore. Each year, there are already over 3 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) working abroad, with hundreds of thousands serving as carers around the world. With a young, top-rated English-speaking population, a cultural norm of caring for the elderly at home, and a deep desire to work abroad and support their families, Filipinos make ideal front-line workers.
Dan Sandiford, Groworx Co-Founder and CEO, says, “We were originally approached by IRT, a long-term client, with the idea to train and make job-ready hundreds of care workers to meet their demands in the Illawarra region in NSW. After many months of planning together, we crafted a detailed program lead by their in-house IRT Academy. A turn-key program like this had never been done before and took serious persistence to pull it all together. We’ve since refined the program so we can deliver onsite to a provider hundreds of workers in a matter of 3-6 months.”
Aged Care Providers around the country are now lining up to leverage the Groworx solution. Originally designed for larger providers needing over 100 workers, the program can now be delivered with as little as 6 workers to a single facility anywhere in Australia. Each month, workers by the busload are being settled from as far south as Merimbula NSW to Carins in Far North Queensland. Groworx is building Regional Care Worker hubs to support the ongoing pastoral needs of workers and Providers in regional and remote areas.
Providers in the Riverina region are applauding the solution, with providers like Allawah Lodge in Coolamon, a town near Wagga Wagga NSW, excited for their workers who will arrive soon. Tony Donoghue says, “We can’t believe the passion these workers have to work in the care. More importantly, they want to build their lives here. This is good for providing better care for the elderly. Farming communities are intergenerational and local. We can keep our residents local, near their families. Now they don’t have to go back to the bigger towns. That’s a lifeline for a provider like ours and the community in general.”
When Dan is asked about his own personal mission, he becomes animated. “I have the best job in the world. I help thousands of Filipinos give hope and real money to their families back home while I’m giving hope to the workers, residents, and communities at a scale that actually means something. For me we are not simply trainers and recruiters, we are building a movement of international healthcare workers to build and manage their careers and lives abroad.”
Offshore training in the Philippines, in pictures:
Photos of Filipino Nurses and Care Workers in Australia
