The sector is short-staffed. The bucket is leaking.
Australia is short tens of thousands of aged care workers. Agencies have built businesses on that shortage, and their rates reflect it. Your recruitment team is doing extraordinary work filling roles in a market where there are barely enough candidates to go round — and then, twelve weeks later, someone walks out the back door and the whole cycle starts again. ethyx doesn't pour more water into the bucket. It helps you find the holes — and patch them.
A workforce shortage nobody manufactured. A leaky bucket nobody can afford.
Australia's aged care sector is operating through the deepest workforce shortage in its history. The Care Workforce Labour Market Study estimates the sector needs another 110,000 direct-care workers by 2030 on top of the people already in roles. International recruitment helps at the margins. Domestic supply is thin. Every provider in the country is fishing the same pond, and the pond is shrinking.
Into that vacuum stepped the agencies. Agency rates for PCWs and RNs have roughly doubled in five years, and in some regional markets a single agency now effectively sets the price of labour for an entire town. None of that is a story about providers failing. It's a story about a structurally broken market where supply and demand have come unstuck from each other.
Your recruitment team is doing extraordinary work. They're sourcing candidates in a market that barely has any, landing them through onboarding, and handing over competent, trained staff. And then, twelve weeks later — or six months, or sometimes a year — someone walks out the back door. The team has filled the top of the bucket beautifully. The bucket itself is leaking.
That is the problem ethyx exists to solve. Not the shortage — we can't manufacture carers. Not the recruitment pipeline — your team already has that covered. The leak. The people who were hired in good faith, by a good recruiter, into a good facility, and who were never going to stay. We help you spot them before they cost you a placement, and catch the committed ones who are drifting away before the resignation letter is written.
110,000+
The structural shortage · sector-wide
Direct-care workers needed by 2030
Per the Care Workforce Labour Market Study. The deepest labour shortage the sector has ever run through.
Agency premium
1.8–2.4×
Over your own labour cost
PCW and RN agency rates before weekend and overnight loadings.
Annual PCW turnover
37–45%
Sector average
One of the highest rates of any sector — roughly double the cross-industry average.
Replacement cost
$15k–$25k
Per carer
Recruitment, checks, onboarding, mandatory training, supervision, ramp. Excludes agency cover.
The gap nobody screens for
89%
Exits driven by commitment
Leadership IQ — hiring failures by attitudinal factors, not competence.
What screening changes
2×
More likely in role at 6–9 months
Committed-stage candidates vs High Risk — Coppin PhD, n=1,247.
The instrument
< 4min
Mobile-first · plain language
Built for frontline workers. On shift, on a phone, between residents.
ROI · 6-month early exits
30–45%
Reduction with ethyx
By screening out High Risk and Flaky candidates at hire and catching pulse-identified flight risks early.
ROI · agency cost avoided
$280k–$680k
Annual saving · 120-bed facility
Based on sector-average agency rates and avoided-vacancy modelling. Most facilities get this back in year one.
ROI · delivered care minutes
+8–14min
Per resident per day
A more stable workforce delivers more direct-care time. Fewer agency hours, fewer handover losses.
Five cost lines nobody puts next to each other.
Together they're the biggest preventable spend in your business.
Finance teams track one of these. Clinical governance teams track another. Rostering tracks a third. They rarely land on the same page — so the true cost of the revolving door stays invisible. Here is the full stack.
Agency premium stacking
Every vacated shift that can't be filled internally becomes an agency shift. Agency rates for PCWs and ENs run 1.8× to 2.4× your own labour cost, and weekend / overnight loadings make it worse. A single full-time vacancy unfilled for six weeks can absorb the entire recruitment budget for that role twice over. Multiply across a facility; the number is rarely under six figures.
Care minutes target slippage
From October 2024, residential providers must deliver an average of 215 care minutes per resident per day, including 44 minutes of RN time. Missing the target has two consequences: financial (AN-ACC funding is tied to delivered minutes, and shortfalls are recovered) and reputational (the figure is published on the My Aged Care Star Rating). Turnover is the single biggest operational threat to hitting the number. If you can't keep carers, you can't hit minutes.
Training investment written off
Under the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, your training burden has gone up — not down. Restrictive practices, trauma-informed care, dementia-specific training, SIRS serious-incident reporting, medication management refreshers. Every carer who leaves within 12 months takes that investment with them. A revolving-door workforce is a training budget you spend twice and get half the compliance uplift from.
Compliance and audit risk
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission's audit framework looks for evidence of stable, competent, continuous workforce delivery against the Standards. High turnover is a leading indicator the Commission watches for. It increases the likelihood of site visits, raises the probability of non-compliance findings, and in serious cases contributes to sanction decisions. It also drives the complaint volume that triggers Commission attention in the first place.
Continuity of care collapse
The clinical cost. A resident with a complex behaviour support plan being approached by a carer who has never met them before is a risk event waiting to happen. Falls go up. Medication errors go up. Pressure injuries go up. SIRS-reportable incidents go up. The families notice. The complaints pile up. The Star Rating drops. The next tour-of-inspection family walks out.
Burnout cascade on the people you want to keep
Every carer who leaves makes the remaining workforce more likely to follow. Overtime increases. Agency staff who don't know the residents add cognitive load. Your best carers, the ones who are most committed to the work, carry the heaviest burden — and eventually burn out. Turnover compounds. The problem you didn't solve last quarter is the reason this quarter is worse.
Two instruments. One behavioural science foundation.
We measure psychological commitment — at hire and across your existing workforce. Use expand on each card to open the full product modal.
Your workforce costs, benchmarked. Your wins, surfaced. Your report, instant.
This calculator models your full aged-care workforce cost stack, from base labour and agency uplift to the hidden churn tax of replacing leavers, and benchmarks every key metric against sector averages from the latest government data. Where you're outperforming, we'll tell you. Where there's opportunity, we'll show you exactly how much. Generate a personalised, password-protected report in under two minutes — no AI-generated fluff, just industry data and hard work.
Report delivery
Get your personalised report
We'll generate a password-protected link with your numbers, continuity view, and evidence-backed retention strategies.
Workforce mix (FTE)
16.6
RN
9.4
EN
55.0
PCW
TOTAL MONTHLY WORKFORCE SPEND
$735k
Per month — sum of base labour, agency uplift, overtime, and turnover. Breakdown follows.
Turnover & replacement from the breakdown below — exit run-rate cost.
Same basis as monthly — full-year run rate (×12).
Agency uplift on covered shifts — matches the agency line in the breakdown below.
Same basis as monthly — full-year run rate (×12).
Monthly workforce spend
Base labour
Own-staff ordinary hours + on-costs
$654,041
Agency uplift on covered shifts
Incremental cost above own-staff roster rates
$27,787
Own-staff overtime uplift
OT share × blended penalty loading
$18,640
Turnover & replacement cost
Annualised recruitment + ramp cost ÷ 12
$34,851
Your agency reliance is low
You're investing in your people from day one
You're outperforming sector average on 7 metrics. See the full breakdown in your report.
ethyx opportunity · annualised
Modelled only on agency uplift, overtime, and turnover — not base labour. About 2% of annual workforce spend ($8.82M/yr). Illustrative; not a quote.
Grounded in four decades of behavioural science.
ethyx isn't a black box. The framework underneath is the Transtheoretical Model of Change, developed by Prochaska & DiClemente in the late 1970s and one of the most rigorously validated behavioural-science frameworks in existence. Dr Darren Coppin's PhD research adapted the TTM for employment — the first time the framework had been operationalised for jobseeking and retention.
1,247
Study I · PhD foundation
Dr Coppin's first study tested the adapted stage-of-change measure on 1,247 unemployed Australians and established that different stages of genuine commitment to work exist and predict sustained employment outcomes.
20,057
Study IV · RCT at scale
A four-year randomised controlled trial of 20,057 jobseekers confirmed that stage-matched interventions outperformed treatment-as-usual across age, gender, ethnicity and jobseeker classification.
250k+
Operational dataset
Since the PhD, the instrument has run across more than 250,000 employees in live recruitment and retention settings — the calibration dataset OPUS is built on today.
The objections worth answering up front.
No. Engagement surveys measure how someone feels. OPUS measures intent — where someone genuinely sits on the psychological commitment spectrum. The two correlate weakly. An engaged carer can still be on their way out; a quietly committed one can look unhappy on a survey. Intent is the signal that actually predicts retention, and it's the one OPUS was built to measure.
Substantially harder than with most psychometric instruments. OPUS measures internal consistency across dozens of signals, and the Inauthentic Action stage exists specifically to catch responses where surface answers don't match underlying patterns. It's a model designed to be robust against the candidate who's trying to tell you what you want to hear.
Yes — and this is where most aged-care providers get burned by generic psychometric tools. OPUS is scoped strictly to work-readiness and commitment. It does not measure personality, character, cognitive ability, or any protected attribute. It's Fair Work Act aligned, APP compliant, consent-first, and every classification produces an audit-ready decision log your compliance team can point at.
That's who it was built for. The instrument is mobile-first, plain-language, under 4 minutes to complete, and designed to be completed on shift or between residents. We've deployed OPUS across hundreds of thousands of frontline workers — cleaning, hospitality, warehousing, disability and aged care. It's not a desk-worker tool retrofitted for carers.
OPUS Screening delivers classifications into your ATS at the point of application — Elmo, PageUp, JobAdder, custom ATS, we've integrated with most of them. OPUS Pulse runs as a standalone mobile experience with manager dashboards; exports are available into your HRIS, LMS and clinical governance reporting. Deployment is measured in weeks, not quarters.
Simple and transparent. Screening is priced per candidate assessed. Pulse is priced per active employee per month. No lock-in, no per-seat gaming, no hidden implementation fees. We'll quote against your actual candidate volume and headcount in the initial chat.
Close the gap between who stays and who you thought would.
Book a free initial chat. No pressure. No free trials. Just real insights and honest conversations.
Contact Us