Your Care Coordinator Spends 15 Hours a Week Chasing Allied Health Providers — Here Is How to Get That Time Back

I was working with a 72-bed residential aged care facility in regional Victoria. Good clinical outcomes, strong community reputation, dedicated staff. The facility manager asked me to look at their administrative workflows because they were haemorrhaging coordinator time and could not figure out where it was going.

I spent a week shadowing the care coordinator. On Monday morning, she arrived at 7:30am and opened a spiral-bound notebook — her master schedule. In it, she had handwritten entries for every allied health visit that week: which residents were seeing which providers, what time, what room, whether the GP had signed off on the referral, and any special notes about the resident’s condition. She cross-referenced this notebook against the facility’s care management system, her email inbox, and a wall calendar with colour-coded sticky notes.

By 9:00am she had already made four phone calls — two to confirm visits, one to reschedule a physiotherapist who had cancelled the previous Friday, and one to chase a speech pathologist who had not submitted visit notes from three weeks ago. This was a typical Monday. By my count, she spent 14.5 hours that week on allied health coordination alone.

The Coordination Tax on Aged Care

Allied health coordination is not a discrete task — it is a web of interdependent steps that touch every part of facility operations. A single physiotherapy visit for one resident involves:

Before the visit: Check that the referral is current and GP-approved. Confirm the provider has availability. Find a time that does not conflict with the resident’s meal schedule, other appointments, or facility activities. Notify nursing staff about the visit. Prepare any equipment or space needed. If the resident has had a change in condition since the last visit, communicate that to the provider.

During the visit: Ensure the resident is available and prepared. If the provider has questions about the resident’s current medications, recent falls, or care plan, someone needs to be available to answer them.

After the visit: Collect the provider’s visit notes and recommendations. Update the care plan if anything has changed. Communicate changes to nursing staff across all three shifts. Notify the family if there are significant updates. Process the provider’s invoice. Schedule the next visit. If the provider recommends a change in visit frequency or a referral to another provider type, initiate that process.

That is roughly 12-15 discrete steps for a single visit. A facility with 60-80 residents might have 30-50 allied health visits per week across all provider types. The maths is straightforward: 30 visits multiplied by 15-20 minutes of coordination per visit equals 7.5-16.5 hours per week. And that is assuming nothing goes wrong — no cancellations, no missed visits, no providers who forget to submit their notes.

Why Manual Coordination Breaks Down

Every aged care facility I have worked with describes the same failure pattern. It starts with one person — the care coordinator — who builds a system that works. Notebook, email folders, colour-coded calendar, mental model of every provider’s quirks and preferences. For a while, it works brilliantly. Then one of three things happens:

The coordinator takes leave. Two weeks of annual leave and the entire system stalls. The replacement does not know that the physiotherapist prefers morning visits, that the speech pathologist needs 48 hours’ notice, or that Mrs. Henderson’s family insists on being notified before every OT visit. Visits get missed. Providers show up to find residents unavailable. Families call to complain about lack of communication.

The facility grows. Adding 10-15 beds — common during expansions or when acquiring an adjacent property — increases the coordination load by 20-30%. The system that worked for 60 residents collapses at 75 because the coordinator cannot scale a manual process.

Regulatory requirements increase. The Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards effective July 2025 require more detailed documentation of allied health service delivery, clinical governance oversight, and outcome measurement. The coordinator who was already stretched thin now needs to produce reports, track outcomes, and maintain audit trails — all from the same notebook and email system.

Building a Coordination System That Survives

The most effective allied health coordination systems I have implemented share three characteristics: they are trigger-based rather than memory-based, they create accountability through visibility, and they reduce the coordinator’s role from doing to reviewing.

Trigger-Based Scheduling

Instead of the coordinator remembering to call the physiotherapist, the system monitors each resident’s visit schedule and triggers outreach automatically. Seven days before a visit is due, the provider receives an email with the resident’s details, available time slots, and a link to confirm. The coordinator does not need to initiate anything — the system handles the routine, and the coordinator only gets involved when something deviates from the plan.

Accountability Through Visibility

When every visit, confirmation, note submission, and care plan update is tracked in a shared sheet, the invisible work becomes visible. Facility managers can see at a glance which providers consistently submit notes on time and which ones need chasing. They can see which residents are overdue for visits and which referrals are stuck waiting for GP approval. This visibility transforms allied health coordination from a black box inside the coordinator’s head into a managed process with clear metrics.

From Doing to Reviewing

The coordinator’s role shifts from manually executing every step to reviewing exceptions. Instead of making 20 phone calls per week, they review a dashboard showing which providers have not confirmed, which visit notes are overdue, and which care plans need updating. Their expertise is applied where it matters most — assessing clinical recommendations, coordinating complex cases, and managing provider relationships — rather than on administrative follow-up.

The Compliance Case for Automation

The Aged Care Quality Standards are not suggestions — they are enforceable requirements with real consequences for non-compliance. Standard 3 (Personal Care and Clinical Care) requires facilities to demonstrate that:

• Residents receive allied health services based on assessed clinical needs
• Care is coordinated across all providers involved in a resident’s care
• Care plans reflect current assessments and recommendations from allied health providers
• There is evidence of ongoing monitoring, review, and adjustment of care

During an audit, assessors will ask to see documentation showing that allied health visits happened as scheduled, that visit notes were incorporated into care plans, and that changes in resident needs triggered appropriate referrals. A manual system where this documentation lives across emails, notebooks, and memory is audit-fragile. A system where every visit is tracked, every note is logged, and every care plan update is timestamped is audit-ready by default.

The financial case compounds the compliance case. With 60% of facilities operating at a loss and mandatory care minute targets consuming clinical staff hours, the 10-15 hours per week that a coordinator spends on allied health administration represents a direct cost to clinical care delivery. Every hour freed from chasing physiotherapist confirmations is an hour that can be spent on care plan reviews, resident assessments, or quality improvement activities — the work that actually improves outcomes and satisfies regulators.

What the Numbers Look Like

For a 72-bed facility with 35-40 allied health visits per week across six provider types:

Before automation: 12-15 hours per week of coordinator time on scheduling, confirmation, note chasing, care plan updates, and family communication. Approximately 15% of visits cancelled or missed due to coordination failures. Visit notes received within one week of visit: 55%. Average time from visit to care plan update: 8-12 days.

After automation: 2-3 hours per week of coordinator time reviewing exceptions and handling complex cases. Cancellation and missed visit rate drops to 3-5%. Visit notes received within one week: 90%. Average time from visit to care plan update: 2-3 days.

The difference — roughly 10 hours per week — is not just an efficiency gain. It is a fundamental change in the care coordinator’s capacity to do the work that actually requires human judgment: assessing clinical recommendations, coordinating between multiple providers for complex residents, supporting families through difficult transitions, and preparing for regulatory audits with confidence rather than anxiety.