Since 1 July 2019, every residential aged care home in Australia has reported against the National Aged Care Quality Indicator Program, better known as the QI Program (informally known as NQIP).
The QI Program was established as a consistent way to measure whether aged care residents were actually receiving good care and is legislated by the Aged Care Act 2024.
This guide covers what each quality indicator measures and why the Department tracks it.
Why the QI Program exists
The Quality Indicator Program in aged care was set up for three reasons, under the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing:
- To give providers robust data to measure their own performance and drive continuous improvement;
- To give older people, families and the community transparent, comparable information to help them choose a home;
- To give government system-level evidence to guide regulation, funding and policy.
In practice, this creates an ongoing benchmarking loop: providers see how they measure up against national data and can show, quarter on quarter, that the care residents are received is improving.
Residential aged care providers collect this data using various aged care software systems, capturing detail from clinical records, workforce timesheets, medication charts and resident surveys.
Once collected, data is consolidated, validated and submitted to the Department through the Government Provider Management System (GPMS) within 21 days of the quarter closing (at 11:59pm AEST).
Providers can benchmark their quality indicator performance against the latest national data, published quarterly with a three-month lag (so the April–June 2026 results were published in October 2026).
The 14 quality indicators
1. Pressure injuries
- Measures: the percentage of residents with one or more pressure injuries, reported against six severity stages.
- Why it matters: pressure injuries are often preventable. A rising rate can point to gaps in skin care, repositioning or staffing and they are painful and expensive to treat.
2. Restrictive practices
- Measures: use of physical, mechanical or environmental restraint, or seclusion. Chemical restraint (that is, through medication) is reported separately, under medication management.
- Why it matters: restrictive practices are considered a limit on an older person's freedom. Person-centred care protects autonomy and dignity, so high use can point to gaps in dementia care.
3. Unplanned weight loss
Significant
- Measures: residents who have lost 5% or more of their body weight within the past three months.
- Why it matters: a sudden, significant drop in weight can signal malnutrition, acute illness, swallowing difficulties or poor mealtime support, and needs a fast clinical response.
Consecutive
- Measures: residents who have lost weight in each of the three most recent months, even where no single month looks severe on its own.
- Why it matters: a slow, steady decline can hide in the data when only single-point checks are used. This measure is designed to catch a gradual pattern before it becomes a significant loss.
4. Falls and major injury
- Measures: residents who experienced one or more falls, and falls that caused a fracture, dislocation or serious head injury.
- Why it matters: falls are one of the most common causes of injury, hospitalisation and loss of independence in older people. Splitting out major injury shows whether prevention is working where it matters most.
5. Medication management
Polypharmacy
- Measures: residents prescribed nine or more medicines.
- Why it matters: overprescribing is a longstanding challenge in aged care: medication regimes can build up gradually as health changes, and drug interactions can drive falls, hospitalisation, cognitive decline and reduced quality of life. Tracking polypharmacy helps catch and reduce unnecessary medication.
Antipsychotics
- Measures: residents receiving antipsychotic medication.
- Why it matters: antipsychotics treat a diagnosed condition of psychosis. High use without that diagnosis points towards chemical restraint rather than evidence-based dementia care.
6. Activities of daily living
- Measures: residents' ability to manage everyday tasks such as eating, dressing, mobility and toileting, assessed using the Barthel Index.
- Why it matters: it shows whether residents can live as independently as possible and still feel valued and in control of their own life. A decline should prompt updated care and extra support, without compromising their dignity.
7. Incontinence care
- Measures: residents with incontinence who go on to develop incontinence-associated dermatitis, skin damage caused by incontinence.
- Why it matters: poor continence management affects dignity, comfort, infection risk and skin integrity. It is a direct marker of day-to-day personal care.
8. Hospitalisation
- Measures: residents with an emergency department presentation or hospital admission during the quarter.
- Why it matters: many transfers are potentially preventable. A high rate can point to gaps in clinical monitoring or delayed intervention, not just how unwell residents already are.
9. Workforce
- Measures: staff turnover across service managers, nurse practitioners, Registered Nurses (RNs), Enrolled Nurses (ENs) and personal care workers (PCWs).
- Why it matters: continuity of care depends on a stable team. High turnover disrupts relationships with residents and erodes workforce capability over time.
10. Consumer experience
- Measures: residents' reported experience of care using a survey, covering respect, decision making, staff skills, wellbeing, social connection and confidence to raise complaints.
- Why it matters: this is an indicator built directly on the resident's own voice, rather than a clinical measurement taken about them.
11. Quality of life
- Measures: residents' self-reported quality of life, using an assessment.
- Why it matters: a home can deliver safe clinical care and still fall short here. This indicator asks whether residents feel connected, purposeful and respected, not just medically safe.
Newer indicators: allied health, enrolled nursing and lifestyle officers
Three additional quality indicators were introduced on 1 April 2025: allied health, enrolled nursing and lifestyle officer care minutes.
While these are reported to the Department each quarter, they calculated from the Quarterly Financial Report (QFR), except for the indicator Allied health – recommended services, which is reported through a provider’s QI Program submission.
12. Allied health
Recommended services received
- Measures: the share of recommended allied health services, such as physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, podiatry and dietetics, that residents actually received.
- Why it matters: a recommendation in a care plan only helps if it’s delivered in good time. Measuring this within the same quarter confirms residents received the allied health service they were recommended, not months later. This indicator is reported in the QI Program.
Allied health care minutes
- Measures: allied health care minutes delivered per resident per day, covering physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, podiatry, dietetics and other allied health services.
- Why it matters: it shows whether residents are getting hands-on allied health support, not just whether a referral was made.
13. Enrolled nurses
- Measures: the proportion of care minutes delivered by enrolled nurses, and by nursing staff overall, combining registered and enrolled nurses.
- Why it matters: it shows the skill mix behind day-to-day care, alongside the clinical outcomes measured above.
14. Lifestyle officers
- Measures: care minutes delivered per resident per day by lifestyle, diversional, recreational and activities officers.
- Why it matters: it puts a number against the support behind residents’ psychological, social and emotional wellbeing, not just their clinical care.
Automating 14 data points into one submission
Every quarter, QI reporting tends to consume substantial clinical staff time.
For instance, one of Loop IQ’s clients reported that the end-to-end QI submission process for 11 facilities was taking two senior clinical staff members 60.5 working days of manual effort per quarter, from data collection to the upload of submissions to GPMS.
With one easy-to-use workflow, Loop IQ’s QI Program software helped this provider demonstrate a 98.6% reduction in QI reporting time, down to approximately 7 hours.
By connecting to a provider’s existing systems and the government, Loop IQ automates QI data extraction, pre-fills submissions and surfaces outliers for validation, in a matter of minutes.
Once reviewed and signed off by staff, the platform lodges submissions directly to the Department in one extra click – reducing quarterly manual QI effort from weeks to hours.
