Workforce Planning, Rostering & Scheduling in Aged Care: Doing More With the Team You Already Have

A five-minute story most care managers will recognise

It’s 2:15pm on a Tuesday in Auckland. Morning shifts ran long, two residents required unplanned one-to-one supervision, and a physio referral turned into an urgent mobility review. Your afternoon roster looked fine on paper, yet by lunch the wheels were wobbling—clinical handovers ran over, one RN called in sick, and the coordinator is juggling swaps and agency calls while families wait for updates.

In home care, three suburbs away, the schedule looks tidy until one worker’s car won’t start and another is stuck across town. The system shows everyone allocated; the lived reality is missed meal support, rushed medication prompts, and a care recipient feeling forgotten.

When it works, workforce planning feels invisible. People are in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills—calm, present, and able to do their best work. Getting there is part science, part craft, and entirely worth the effort.

Why aged care workforce planning is different (and harder)

Every sector struggles with supply and demand. Aged care adds layers not found elsewhere:

• Care never stops. Demand is 24/7, and small disruptions have real human consequences.
• Complex rules. Awards and EBAs, mandated skill mixes, medication competencies, manual handling requirements, and ratio expectations all intersect.
• Unpredictable acuity. Falls, delirium, infections, and behavioural changes can spike demand within a shift.
• Home care logistics. Travel time, parking, route planning, and variable dwell times quickly multiply small inefficiencies.
• Thin margins. Funding changes and rising costs make labour efficiency the make-or-break lever.
• Workforce scarcity. Competing sectors, immigration settings, and cost of living pressures mean every hour must count—for quality and retention.

The way through isn’t magic software or more meetings. It’s a disciplined approach to demand forecasting, skill-mix and roster design, with simple rules teams can follow even on a busy day.

The three rhythms of an effective workforce model

Think about planning across three time horizons, each with its own cadence:

1. Strategic (quarterly to annual).
   Set the operating model and budget guardrails: service promises, funding assumptions, baseline staffing establishment by unit (or region), and target skill mix. Decide which services to in-house vs. partner, and where to centralise rostering vs. keep it close to the floor.
2. Tactical (weekly to monthly).
   Forecast demand and convert it to a forward roster: leave planning, shift patterns, and training days locked in; agency caps and overtime guardrails; home care demand clustered into efficient runs; surge plans noted.
3. Operational (daily to shift).
   Adjust to what today’s reality brings: add-on tasks, resident acuity changes, late discharges/admissions, call-ins. Use short-interval control—quick huddles with clear rules for redeployments, breaks, and escalation.

Nail the rhythms and your team spends less time firefighting and more time caring.

Forecast demand before you roster supply

Rostering without a demand view is guesswork. Start with these inputs:

• Residential care: Occupancy, acuity scores, behavioural support needs, clinical risk flags, allied health schedules, and mealtime/med-round patterns.
• Home care: Package levels, scheduled services, geography, dwelling access complexity, historical dwell time variance, and seasonal illness patterns.
• Constraints: Mandatory training, supervision ratios, medication endorsements, and known leave or appointment blocks.

Translate demand into workload drivers—for example: personal care minutes by acuity band, medication prompts per round, turns/repositioning counts, meal assistance counts, cleaning frequencies, and social support blocks. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it needs to be consistent and transparent.

Skill mix: safe, sustainable, and affordable

Good rosters manage three trade-offs at once:

• Safety and quality. Ensure an RN (or EN where appropriate) is present and truly available for clinical escalation, with PCWs/HCWs configured to cover predictable peaks—mornings, evenings, and weekends.
• Workload and wellbeing. Avoid patterns that drive fatigue: too many “clopen” turns, split shifts that chew family time, or long strings of high-acuity assignments.
• Cost discipline. Push as many hours as possible into ordinary time, reserve overtime for real peaks, and keep agency as a safety net, not a habit.

A practical principle for residential care: staff to the routine, buffer for the exception. Build rosters that comfortably handle core routines (personal care, meals, meds, activities), then design a small, flexible buffer for unpredictable events—float roles or short “swing” shifts that can be moved where the heat map says it’s needed.

The roster that “feels” right on the floor

Frontline teams can tell in minutes if a roster will work. It generally has these traits:

• Clear anchor points. Predictable start times for core roles; medication rounds and personal care clustered to avoid collisions.
• Short, smart overlaps. Handover windows sized to acuity—long enough to be safe, not so long they waste hours.
• Named responsibilities. Break coverage, clinical escalation points, and task ownership defined in advance.
• Balanced sequences. Rotas spread heavy tasks and high-acuity residents across the week and the team; time for catch-up or activities is protected.
• Simple rules. Swaps and redeployments follow standard patterns; everyone knows the triage triggers for calling in extra help.

Aim for “boringly reliable.” The shine comes from calm shifts, not clever patterns.

Home care: the hardest last mile

Great home care schedules look like good transport plans: you minimise total travel, hit time windows, and cover priority tasks. A few essentials:

• Geographic clustering. Lock “micro-catchments” so workers can build familiarity and reduce travel friction.
• Time-window realism. Not all services are truly time-critical; define flexible windows where safe.
• Dwell time libraries. Base durations on measured history, not wishful thinking; adjust for mobility, home layout, and social factors.
• Contingency minutes. Insert small buffers across a run rather than one big gap; it absorbs variance better.
• Client continuity. Fewer faces usually means better outcomes. Make continuity a scheduling objective, not a nice-to-have.
• Travel & pay compliance. Systematically capture kilometres and time between visits, and ensure pay rules reflect it correctly.

Routing tools help, but only if your data and rules are sound. Start small—optimise one region, learn, then scale.

Award, EBA and compliance—treat rules as design inputs

Australian and New Zealand providers manage a patchwork of awards, EBAs and local policies. Bake rules into roster design so compliance is automatic:

• Ordinary time limits, rest breaks and minimum breaks between shifts
• Span of hours, weekend and public holiday loadings
• Minimum engagement times (especially in home care)
• Overtime triggers and averaging arrangements
• Skill and supervision requirements for restricted tasks (e.g., medication)
• Qualifications currency and mandatory training

A workable approach: build a “rule bible” and translate it into configuration for your rostering system. Avoid manual patch-ups; they’re error-prone and morale-sapping.

Agency use: a safety net, not a strategy

Sometimes you need agency staff. But habitually relying on them erodes quality, culture and cash. Manage agency with intent:

• Set a cap. By site/region and shift type, so it’s a conscious choice to exceed it.
• Use a roster escalation ladder. Split shifts, redeployments, and overtime used in a consistent order before agency is called.
• Prefer known temps. Maintain a small, vetted pool to improve consistency.
• Measure substitution effects. Track medication error rates, incidents, and client feedback on agency-heavy days to inform decisions.

Often, the best agency reduction lever is better leave planning and earlier visibility of gaps.

Data and dashboards that matter

Dashboards shouldn’t be wallpaper. Keep them tight and action-oriented:

• Coverage & stability: Fill rate, unplanned vacancy hours, and roster changes inside 48 hours.
• Overtime & agency: Overtime hours as % of paid hours; agency hours and cost against cap.
• Quality & safety proxies: Medication round delays, missed/late visits, incident rates by hour of day, and care plan adherence.
• Workforce wellbeing: Balance of weekends/nights, consecutive days worked, cancelled shifts, and travel minutes per hour of work (home care).
• Financials: Labour cost per occupied bed day (residential) or per service hour (home care), and variance to plan.

Review weekly at the right level: site/regional leaders with rostering leads, not a top-down broadcast.

Technology: get the plumbing right before the chandelier

Rostering and scheduling platforms are powerful, but they don’t fix unclear processes. Prioritise:

1. Clean master data. People (skills, endorsements, availability), clients (care plans, time windows), locations, and pay rules.
2. Simple workflows. A small set of standard roster templates; clear leave request and approval paths; consistent swap rules.
3. Interoperability. Rostering talks to payroll, HRIS, care management, and finance; home care routing can import/export to the same source of truth.
4. Mobility. Staff can see shifts, accept changes, log travel, and confirm tasks in one place—without tapping through ten screens.
5. Auditability. System logs who changed what and when—vital for complaints, audits, and continuous improvement.

If you’re mid-implementation, resist customising away good discipline. Configure for your reality but keep the vendor-supported backbone intact.

Building a workforce that wants to stay

You won’t roster your way out of a retention problem, but your roster can make people stay:

• Predictability with flexibility. Publish rosters early, enable preferences where possible, and keep last-minute changes for genuine needs.
• Fairness you can see. Spread nights, weekends and public holidays equitably, and let the system prove it.
• A voice at the table. Frontline input into roster patterns and post-implementation reviews.
• Time to care. Rosters that budget minutes for relationship-building—not just task completion—lift morale and outcomes.
• Learning built-in. Protect training time and preceptorship; don’t make development something people must do “off the side of the desk”.

Retention is the cheapest workforce strategy you have. Treat it as a design objective.

A practical 90-day roadmap

Days 0–15: See it clearly

• Walk two sites and one home care region. Shadow a coordinator.
• Map the roster “hot spots”: missed visits, overtime clusters, agency spikes, and travel blowouts.
• Extract a clean baseline: paid hours, agency %, overtime %, labour per OB day/service hour, coverage gaps, and late changes.

Days 16–45: Stabilise the basics

• Clean master data for the biggest units/regions and build 3–5 standard roster templates per setting.
• Lock a leave planning cadence (quarterly) and a fortnightly roster freeze window.
• Stand up a daily 10-minute staffing huddle with a simple escalation ladder.
• In home care, pilot one micro-catchment: route plans with realistic dwell times and travel buffers.

Days 46–90: Build repeatable discipline

• Launch a weekly performance pack with five measures and three actions.
• Implement a small float/swing capacity in residential units to absorb predictable peaks.
• Introduce continuity targets in home care (e.g., top 20 clients see no more than three workers in a month).
• Negotiate agency caps and a preferred pool; align internal incentives to reduce agency first, not last.
• Publish a six-month workforce plan: skill mix, recruitment focus, and training commitments.

You’ll see relief inside weeks and cultural lift within three months.

Frequently asked (and fair) questions

“Can we really reduce agency without risking care?”
Yes—by improving forward visibility of gaps, locking leave earlier, and creating small internal buffers. Agency becomes the exception, not the habit.

“What’s the best roster pattern?”
There isn’t one. Your best pattern balances your routines, care model, physical layout, and funding. Build 3–5 standard templates and iterate using real-world feedback.

“Do we need new software?”
Maybe. But start by fixing process clarity, master data, and rules. Then decide whether your current system can support the discipline you need.

“How do we respect preferences and still cover the floor?”
Use preference windows rather than promises, bake fairness into the pattern, and be transparent about the trade-offs. People value honesty as much as flexibility.

“What’s the simplest metric to start with?”
Pick two: labour cost per OB day (or service hour) and agency % of total hours. Add one quality proxy (missed/late services) and one wellbeing measure (consecutive days or weekend balance).

The leadership behaviours that make it stick

• Walk the roster. Leaders join the huddles, ask about pinch points, and remove obstacles.
• Celebrate the boring wins. Quiet shifts, on-time rounds, and full coverage deserve a shout-out.
• Hold the line. Protect freeze windows and escalation ladders; don’t undo discipline with ad-hoc exceptions.
• Share the proof. Publish small monthly wins—reduced agency, fewer missed visits, happier teams.
• Keep changing one thing at a time. Iteration beats upheaval; swap in improvements gently and learn.

How Trace Consultants can help

Trace Consultants partners with aged care providers across Australia and New Zealand to design and embed practical workforce models—without adding bureaucracy or disrupting care.

Here’s how we typically support:

• Rapid workforce diagnostic. A 2–4 week, on-the-floor assessment of roster patterns, award/EBA rules in practice, agency reliance, home care routing, and data quality. We share a plain-English findings pack and a prioritised 90-day plan.
• Roster and scheduling redesign. Co-design of standard templates for residential and home care, alignment of handover windows, float/swing capacity, and realistic travel buffers and dwell times.
• Rule translation and system configuration. We convert your awards/EBAs and policies into system rules, simplify workflows, and harden integrations with payroll, HR, and care systems.
• Home care routing uplift. Micro-catchment design, route templates, continuity targets, and a practical process for handling on-day changes.
• Agency reduction program. Caps and governance, preferred pools, internal float development, and measurement of quality and cost impacts.
• Capability lift and change management. Rostering playbooks, coordinator coaching, and a leadership cadence that sustains improvement long after the project.

We focus on measurable outcomes—safer care, steadier shifts, and labour used where it matters most.

A short checklist you can use this week

• Are next fortnight’s rosters published and 80% stable?
• Do we have named float/swing capacity on our busiest units?
• Have we set a clear escalation ladder before calling agency?
• In home care, are two micro-catchments genuinely clustered with realistic dwell times?
• Can we show fairness on weekends/nights over the past eight weeks?
• Do our coordinators have a 10-minute daily huddle with a simple staffing board?
• Are we reporting one wellbeing and one quality proxy alongside cost and coverage?

If you can tick four or more, you’re on the right path. If not, you’ve got clear, achievable next steps.

Bringing it all together

Great rosters aren’t just tidy spreadsheets. They’re lived experiences: calmer corridors, unhurried meals, on-time meds, meaningful conversations, and teams who feel proud—not depleted—at the end of a shift. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a workforce model that respects the work, uses people’s time wisely, and treats rules as guides, not obstacles.

Start small. Pick one unit or region. Clean the data, agree the rules, and lock two simple routines: a fortnightly roster rhythm and a daily huddle. Build a modest buffer, hold your freeze window, and measure only what you’ll act on. Progress compounds quickly when the basics are steady.

And if you want a partner to help you see the whole picture, make the right trade-offs, and embed the new rhythms, Trace Consultants is ready to work shoulder-to-shoulder with your team.

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1. Why Workforce Planning, Rostering, and Scheduling Matter

For organisations across healthcare, aged care, retail, hospitality, logistics, and government services, the workforce is both the largest cost and the most critical enabler of service. Yet too often, staffing decisions are reactive—filling rosters at the last minute, plugging gaps with overtime, or overstaffing to be “safe”.

This ad-hoc approach can erode margins, burn out staff, and leave service levels vulnerable. In contrast, organisations that plan, roster, and schedule with precision can:

• Match labour supply to demand more accurately.
• Reduce overtime and agency costs.
• Improve staff satisfaction and retention.
• Maintain or improve service levels, even in peak periods.
• Build resilience to sudden changes.

At Trace Consultants, we help Australian and New Zealand organisations design workforce strategies that balance service, cost, and workforce engagement—backed by data, informed by industry best practice, and tailored to each client’s operating environment.

2. Breaking Down the Three Layers

While often grouped together, workforce planning, rostering, and scheduling operate at different levels of detail and time horizon.

2.1 Workforce Planning – The Strategic Layer

Workforce planning answers:
“How many people, in what roles, with what skills, do we need over the next 1–5 years?”

It’s about anticipating demand and shaping the workforce to match:

• Long-term recruitment planning.
• Skill development and training pathways.
• Shifts in service models or technology use.
• Geographic redeployment of roles.

2.2 Rostering – The Tactical Layer

Rostering answers:
“How do we allocate staff to shifts over the next 2–8 weeks?”

It’s about:

• Matching staff availability and skills to forecast demand.
• Ensuring compliance with awards, enterprise agreements, and labour laws.
• Balancing full-time, part-time, casual, and contract staff mix.
• Supporting fairness and transparency for staff.

2.3 Scheduling – The Operational Layer

Scheduling answers:
“Who is doing what, where, and when today or tomorrow?”

It’s the real-time execution:

• Allocating specific tasks, jobs, or locations.
• Managing last-minute changes (absences, urgent jobs).
• Communicating updates to staff clearly and quickly.

3. The ANZ Workforce Context

3.1 Labour Market Tightness

Low unemployment and skills shortages make efficient workforce use critical—every wasted hour is an opportunity cost.

3.2 Award and Agreement Complexity

Australian and New Zealand organisations operate under a patchwork of awards, EBAs, and compliance requirements, making manual rostering risky.

3.3 Geographic Challenges

From remote aged care facilities in WA to seasonal horticulture in NZ, location shapes workforce availability and cost.

3.4 Increasing Service Expectations

Customers, patients, and citizens expect faster response, extended hours, and personalised service—all of which put pressure on staffing models.

4. Common Challenges We See

1. Reactive Rostering – Rosters built to “fill gaps” rather than meet demand forecasts.
2. Poor Demand Forecasting – No clear link between workload demand and roster design.
3. Overtime & Agency Blowouts – Due to short-notice coverage and inflexible rosters.
4. Low Staff Engagement – Perceived unfairness, unpredictable shifts, and poor communication.
5. Manual Processes – Spreadsheets that can’t handle complexity or compliance rules.
6. Disconnected Systems – Workforce planning, payroll, and operations not integrated.

5. Best Practice Principles

From our work at Trace Consultants, there are six principles that underpin effective workforce planning, rostering, and scheduling:

5.1 Start with Demand

Accurate demand forecasting is the foundation. This could be:

• Patient admissions and acuity in healthcare.
• Sales transactions in retail.
• Bookings or job orders in services.

5.2 Define Your Service Model

Be clear on what “good” looks like:

• Response times.
• Service coverage hours.
• Skill-to-task matching.

5.3 Use the Right Workforce Mix

Balance:

• Permanent vs. casual.
• Full-time vs. part-time.
• Specialist vs. multi-skilled roles.

5.4 Build Flexibility

Use split shifts, on-call pools, and redeployment to handle variability without excess cost.

5.5 Leverage Technology

Move beyond manual rostering. Modern workforce management systems automate compliance checks, allow self-service, and integrate with payroll.

5.6 Engage Staff in the Process

Transparency and fairness in rostering build trust and improve retention.

6. The Role of Technology

Technology can transform workforce planning and rostering from a reactive, admin-heavy process into a strategic enabler.

Capabilities include:

• AI-driven demand forecasting – factoring in historical patterns, seasonality, and external events.
• Automated compliance checks – ensuring rosters meet award/EBA requirements.
• Self-service portals – letting staff view rosters, swap shifts, and request leave.
• Real-time updates – pushing changes to staff via mobile apps.

At Trace Consultants, we help clients select and implement technology that suits their size, complexity, and budget—whether enterprise-grade systems or tactical, lower-cost solutions.

7. Building an Integrated Workforce Planning Model

An integrated model links the strategic, tactical, and operational layers:

1. Strategic Workforce Planning informs recruitment, training, and workforce mix decisions.
2. Demand Forecasting feeds rostering cycles, ensuring labour supply meets predicted workload.
3. Rostering allocates staff to shifts in compliance with agreements and operational needs.
4. Daily Scheduling assigns tasks and locations, adjusting for real-time changes.
5. Performance Measurement tracks cost, productivity, and service outcomes—feeding back into planning.

8. Industry Applications

Healthcare & Aged Care

• Matching staff skills to patient acuity levels.
• Managing home care visit schedules for efficiency and compliance.
• Reducing agency dependency.

Retail & Hospitality

• Aligning staff hours to peak trading patterns.
• Balancing service quality with wage cost control.

Logistics & Field Services

• Optimising driver or technician schedules to minimise travel time.
• Managing fatigue compliance in transport.

Government & Emergency Services

• Ensuring 24/7 coverage with fatigue and skill mix considerations.
• Scaling up for surge events or seasonal demand.

9. How Trace Consultants Can Help

At Trace Consultants, we take a data-led, people-centred approach to workforce planning, rostering, and scheduling projects.

Our support typically includes:

• Current State Assessment – Analysing rostering practices, workforce mix, and cost/service performance.
• Demand Forecasting Models – Using historical and external data to predict workload patterns.
• Roster Design – Aligning shifts, skills, and coverage to forecast demand.
• Technology Selection & Deployment – Identifying and implementing the right workforce management tools.
• Change Management – Building leadership and frontline capability to sustain improvements.
• Performance Tracking Frameworks – Setting KPIs for cost, productivity, and service levels.

Because we’re independent and vendor-agnostic, our recommendations are always aligned to your operational goals, not tied to a particular software or supplier.

10. Measuring Success

Improvements should be measured against a clear baseline, using metrics such as:

• Labour cost as a % of revenue or service output.
• Overtime and agency hours as a % of total hours.
• Staff turnover and absenteeism rates.
• Compliance breaches or penalties.
• Service level performance.

11. Future Trends

• Predictive Workforce Planning – Using AI and machine learning to anticipate demand changes earlier.
• Total Workforce Management – Integrating permanent, casual, contractor, and gig workers into one system.
• Employee Experience Focus – Designing rosters that improve work-life balance as a retention tool.
• Sustainability & Social Responsibility – Considering workforce planning’s role in meeting ESG goals.

Final Thoughts

Workforce planning, rostering, and scheduling are not just administrative tasks—they are strategic levers that can make or break service delivery, cost control, and workforce engagement.

In Australia and New Zealand’s competitive and resource-constrained environment, the organisations that succeed will be those that treat their workforce as a planned, optimised asset—not just a cost to manage.

By combining data analysis, operational insight, and a deep understanding of people and change, Trace Consultants helps organisations build workforce planning frameworks that deliver service excellence, cost efficiency, and a better employee experience.

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Maximising Workflow Efficiency Using My Aged Care Portal by Leveraging MS Power Apps

The Reality of Aged Care Administration

Anyone working in Aged Care knows that compliance and service go hand in hand. But too often, the administrative tools designed to enable care—like the My Aged Care (MAC) Portal—can feel more like a constraint than a capability.

For executives tasked with managing workforce costs, maintaining service continuity, and staying compliant with government requirements, the MAC Portal presents a common pain point. It's necessary for funding and accountability, yet it introduces friction into rostering, scheduling, and case management workflows. Repetitive data entry, fragmented approval processes, and lack of real-time integration with workforce systems often force frontline teams to work in silos, create duplicative workarounds, or fall into inefficiencies that ultimately impact both cost and quality of care.

But what if there was a better way? What if the MAC Portal wasn’t something to fight against—but something to design around?

At Trace Consultants, we’re seeing a clear shift: aged care providers are moving away from waiting for government IT systems to evolve, and instead proactively building tools around them. And one of the most effective enablers is Microsoft Power Apps.

The MAC Portal Challenge: Designed for Compliance, Not Efficiency

The MAC Portal is a critical platform for aged care providers—used to receive referrals, manage assessments, access client funding approvals, and meet reporting requirements. But while it supports government compliance, it wasn’t designed with seamless integration or modern user experience in mind.

Common pain points include:

• Manual data entry that needs to be replicated across scheduling, case management, and rostering tools
• Delays in referral visibility or assignment slowing down intake and onboarding
• Fragmented workflow between client approval and workforce scheduling
• Lack of integration with internal CRMs or workforce management systems
• High administrative burden on care coordinators, team leaders and schedulers

These gaps create operational inefficiencies and increase the risk of:

• Missed service windows or under-delivery against Home Care Package (HCP) or CHSP hours
• Inefficient workforce deployment and last-minute shift changes
• Reduced ability to forecast demand and match the right care worker with the right client
• Rising costs due to overtime, travel inefficiencies, and duplicated admin

In short, the MAC Portal is a reality—but it doesn’t need to be the limiting factor in your operating model.

Designing Around Constraints: The Power of Workflow Mapping

One of the most important first steps in improving efficiency is to map your existing workflow in and around the MAC Portal. That means asking:

• What actions are triggered when a referral is received?
• Where do handovers, duplication or rework occur?
• What tools (Excel, email, SharePoint, workforce software) are used downstream?
• Who is responsible for manually bridging gaps between MAC and other systems?

Once that’s understood, you can identify where digital tools like Microsoft Power Apps can automate, streamline, or enhance these processes—without needing to rebuild your core systems or compromise compliance.

This design-led approach ensures that your workflows are purpose-built for your organisation’s structure, care models, and technology stack—while still fitting around the MAC Portal’s constraints. Trace Consultants provides support in mapping these workflows and identifying digital tools that best fit your operations.

The Case for Microsoft Power Apps in Aged Care

Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code/no-code platform that enables organisations to build custom business applications that integrate with Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, and other systems—even if they don’t integrate directly with MAC.

Why Power Apps is ideal for Aged Care:

• Custom workflows: You can build intake, scheduling, or service tracking tools tailored to how your teams work—not generic templates.
• Mobile-first: Apps work across desktop and mobile, enabling real-time updates from care workers, schedulers, and coordinators in the field.
• Data capture: Structured forms allow accurate data collection at the source—reducing rework and improving auditability.
• System integration: While MAC may not offer open APIs, Power Apps can link with your rostering software, payroll, SharePoint, and CRMs to fill the gaps.
• Automation: Combine Power Apps with Power Automate to streamline approval chains, notify staff of new referrals, or update care plans automatically.
• Scalable and cost-effective: Built on your existing Microsoft licence, Power Apps often avoid the cost and complexity of third-party integrations.

Trace Consultants has helped aged care clients build and deploy custom Microsoft Power Apps that fit within existing compliance frameworks while creating meaningful process improvements.

A Real-World Workflow Example

To make this real, let’s walk through a simplified care delivery workflow—and how MS Power Apps can improve it when working around the MAC Portal.

Scenario: Home Care Referral and Service Scheduling

Traditional Workflow (Pain Points Highlighted)

1. New HCP referral received via MAC Portal
2. Referral printed or copied into email to team leader
3. Admin manually enters client info into CRM and scheduling system
4. Team leader assigns case manager and care coordinator
5. Coordinator builds schedule in rostering tool or Excel
6. Care workers notified manually via SMS or calls
7. MAC Portal updated separately after visits completed

Challenges:

• Multiple data handovers
• Rework across CRM, MAC and rostering
• No visibility for care workers or admin staff in real-time
• Scheduling often misaligned with workforce availability

Improved Workflow with MS Power Apps

1. New referral received → Coordinator logs referral in Power App (structured form)
2. App pushes referral info to SharePoint and notifies care team
3. Coordinator assigns worker based on location, availability, skills (Power App links to roster data)
4. Auto-generated weekly schedule built in Power App, accessible via mobile
5. Visit outcomes logged by workers on mobile, triggering alerts if follow-up is needed
6. Power Automate flags services completed for MAC update and triggers internal QA processes

Benefits:

• Eliminates email/Excel duplication
• Reduces admin time and service delays
• Improves transparency across scheduling, rostering, and care delivery
• Enables better compliance and reporting without manual MAC re-entry

This type of solution is achievable when partnering with experienced consulting teams like Trace Consultants.

Unlocking Efficiency in Rostering and Scheduling

Effective rostering in aged care is about more than just filling shifts. It’s about aligning workforce capacity to demand, managing fatigue, and ensuring clients receive the right care, from the right person, at the right time.

By redesigning rostering workflows around the MAC Portal’s known constraints, aged care providers can:

• Streamline shift planning: Use Power Apps to create structured, automated processes for intake-to-schedule.
• Optimise travel: Build tools that factor in client locations and workforce geography to minimise travel time and costs.
• Enable responsiveness: Equip schedulers with real-time alerts and mobile tools to respond quickly to cancellations or changes.
• Improve client continuity: Match workers to clients based on past history, preferences, and continuity goals.
• Increase forecast accuracy: Track scheduled vs. actual service delivery to inform future workforce planning.

We work with providers to build these capabilities through tailored solutions. Learn more about rostering and scheduling improvement at Trace.

Risks of Not Acting

Many aged care providers are still relying on workarounds like spreadsheets, emails, and manual processes to bridge gaps between the MAC Portal and their rostering systems. These create:

• Hidden costs: Labour hours lost to admin tasks that could be automated
• Compliance risks: Inconsistent data and missed documentation
• Workforce frustration: Fatigue from manual scheduling, missed shifts or travel inefficiencies
• Client dissatisfaction: Inconsistencies in care quality or availability

With increased scrutiny on aged care delivery and funding models, inefficiencies that were once tolerated are now under the spotlight. Providers who continue to “make do” may struggle to meet compliance requirements, retain staff, or scale services cost-effectively.

How Trace Consultants Can Help

At Trace Consultants, we support aged care organisations across Australia by helping them optimise their service delivery through smarter workflows and practical technology deployment.

Our approach is grounded in:

• Deep understanding of aged care operational models
• Experience working within MAC Portal constraints
• Capability to build and deploy Microsoft Power Apps that support workforce planning
• Strategic focus on linking workflow changes to measurable cost and service improvements

Whether you're beginning your workflow transformation or looking to scale an existing initiative, our Supply Chain IT Transformation team can help you move forward—faster.

Why Now?

The aged care sector is under pressure to do more with less: more compliance, more hours delivered, more responsiveness to client needs—without increasing overheads. Investing in a smart, workflow-led approach to technology is no longer optional. It’s strategic.

With the Australian Government investing in digital transformation of aged care, and the sector moving toward more structured reporting and transparency, now is the time to build the digital muscle needed to thrive—not just survive.

Redesigning workflows around MAC and investing in tools like Power Apps is a practical, scalable way to build that muscle—delivering real ROI, improving staff experience, and ultimately enabling better care.

Turning a Constraint into a Catalyst

The My Aged Care Portal isn’t going anywhere. But that doesn’t mean your operating model needs to be constrained by it.

By designing workflows around its limitations, and using modern tools like Microsoft Power Apps, aged care providers can unlock significant value—reducing admin costs, improving rostering outcomes, and ultimately enabling more time for what matters most: delivering care.

At Trace Consultants, we specialise in helping aged care organisations operationalise these improvements—with a deep understanding of your workforce, systems, and service model.

Ready to rethink how you work with MAC instead of against it?
Visit our Contact Us page or reach out to our team to explore how we can help.

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