001 Aged care governance, the health system, and crisis management

Aged care is not just a care sector but critical infrastructure in the health system: essential, heavily used, and under load. It must keep running when things go wrong, making crisis management a governance concern, not just operational. Chronic pressures, workforce, thin finances and tight capacity, erode its ability to absorb shocks: pandemics, heatwaves, floods, systems failure and cyber outages. Boards should know their critical functions, single points of failure and dependencies, plan for disruption, and test plans rather than shelve them, and connect outward to hospitals and ambulance services.