How did health service use by aged care residents change during the COVID-19 pandemic?
This section provides an overview of changes in the use of selected health services for people living in residential aged care during the first 3 years of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 to 2022) compared with a pre-pandemic year (2019):
- Medicare-subsidised general practitioner (GP) and specialist attendances by mode of delivery (face-to-face and telehealth)
- the dispensing of selected medicines through the PBS: antipsychotics, antidepressants, benzodiazepines, opioids and dementia-specific medications.
Measures of service use
This section shows service use in quarters of a calendar year between 2019 and 2022:
- ‘March quarter’ refers to January – March
- ‘June quarter’ refers to April – June
- ‘September quarter’ refers to July – September
- ‘December quarter’ refers to October – December.
Percentage of people who used a service
‘Percent of residents with 1+ services’ is the percentage of aged care residents with at least one service recorded in the linked data.
Average number of services per person
The average number of services per residents was calculated for:
- aged care residents who used the service at least once in the quarter, referred to in the report as ‘Number of services per resident’
- all aged care residents in the cohort, regardless of whether they used the service in the quarter. These data follow the same pattern as the ‘Percentage’ data and can be found in the Supplementary data tables.
See Analysis methods for more information.