Australia's Department of Health is setting up a new reporting tool in which aged care service providers can report their COVID-19 cases.

The COVID-19 Support Portal on the My Aged Care provider website will allow aged care services to submit de-identified data about COVID-19 outbreaks or exposures at their facilities.

WHY IT MATTERS

Case reporting through the new online site will begin on 28 February. Before then, providers will still have to submit their counts to the government by email. 

"The information collected via the new COVID-19 Support Portal is the same as the existing information required to be reported by providers to the Department of Health. We are simply making it more streamlined and effective," the department said in a recent update. The portal, it added, will help "expedite the provision of support to providers when an outbreak occurs".

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The Health Department is streamlining aged care providers' reporting of COVID-19 cases amid mounting deaths. Recorded deaths within the sector in the first two months of 2022 have surpassed the count in the whole of 2020, according to government data. Around a thousand aged care facilities are currently battling outbreaks caused by the highly infectious Omicron variant.

The addition of the new reporting tool follows the launch of a similar portal introduced on the My Aged Care site where providers can report the vaccination status of their workforce. The weekly reporting of the aged care workforce's vaccination status has been made mandatory for providers since June last year.