Analysis of Rest Homes in New Zealand

In this analysis I summarise the full list of certified rest home providers in New Zealand, a publicly available dataset, released by the Ministry of Health-Manatū Hauora (2023).

I downloaded the dataset on the 28th of July 2023. In order to clean the data, I filtered out rest homes with an accreditation that ended before 2023 (2). After this, there is a total of 665 rest homes remaining. These rest homes have a total bed count of 41,235.

In the dataset each rest home provider is a associated with a list of services they offer. The services offered are, in order of decreasing frequency, Rest home care, Geriatric, Medical, Dementia care, Physical, Psychogeriatric, Intellectual, Maternity, Psychiatric, Sensory, and Mental health. The number of rest homes that offer each service is shown in Figure 1. Most homes provide some geriatric and medical services in addition to rest home care. Some homes don’t provide standard rest home care, but instead only provide dementia care. This appears to be why the proportion of rest homes that offer “rest home care” is not 100%.

Figure 1: Number of rest homes that offer each service.

The proportion of homes that offer medical services is visualised in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Proportion of homes with medical as one of their services.

Dementia care is provided by more than a third of all rest homes as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Proportion of homes with dementia care as one of their services.

The rest homes have between 7 and 236 beds, with 75% of homes having between 35 and 81 beds. The average (mean) number of beds is 62.0 and the median number of beds is 55. The distribution is visualised in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The distribution of the number of beds per rest home provider.

The top 10 districts with most rest homes are shown in Table 1. The districts with most rest homes are likely to have greater populations.

Table 1: Top 10 districts by number of rest homes.

District	Rest homes
Canterbury District Health Board	90
Auckland District Health Board	68
Waitemata District Health Board	68
Southern District Health Board	65
Waikato District Health Board	58
Counties Manukau District Health Board	44
Bay of Plenty District Health Board	35
MidCentral District Health Board	35
Capital and Coast District Health Board	31
Hawke’s Bay District Health Board	27

The top 10 legal entities with the most rest homes are shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Top 10 legal entities by number of rest homes.

Legal entity	Rest homes
Bupa Care Services NZ Limited	44
Oceania Care Company Limited	37
Summerset Care Limited	25
Heritage Lifecare Limited	24
Radius Residential Care Limited	23
Metlifecare Retirement Villages Limited	19
The Ultimate Care Group Limited	18
CHT Healthcare Trust	16
Presbyterian Support Central	13
Heritage Lifecare (BPA) Limited	11

The distribution of accreditation end dates gives an indication of the re-accreditation needs over time. We see in Figure 5 that in the immediate future there are fewer accreditation periods ending as most homes get re-accredited with some time margin. There are also clusters of accreditation end dates, possibly attributable to multiple homes being accreditated at a similar times and accreditation periods being multiples of 12 months.

Figure 5: The end of the accreditation period as at date of data extraction.

The auditors that were used for these accreditations were as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Proportion of accreditations that were completed by each auditor.

The proportion of accreditations performed by each auditor are also tabulated in Table 3.

Table 3: The auditors used.

Auditor	n	Proportion
Health and Disability Auditing New Zealand Limited	400	60.2%
The DAA Group Limited	230	34.6%
Central Region’s Technical Advisory Services Limited	22	3.3%
HealthShare Limited	13	2.0%

More detailed analysis of New Zealand rest homes, especially with respect to audit performance, is not practicable with the way public audit report data is currently shared. Nevertheless, I hope this analysis provided some insight into rest homes in New Zealand.

References

Ministry of Health-Manatū Hauora. 2023. “Certified Rest Home Providers.” https://www.health.govt.nz/your-health/certified-providers/aged-care.