Amber Witherdin is CEO of PACE Care and a CPA-qualified finance executive with extensive experience across aged care, health, technology and the public sector.
Her aged care career has included senior finance leadership within a major provider, giving her first-hand understanding of the financial, operational and regulatory pressures facing providers.
Today, Amber leads PACE Care, a not-for-profit shared services organisation supporting aged care providers across Australia with finance capability. Her experience spans both the provider and shared-services sides of the sector, with a particular focus on how better operating models, technology, data and specialist capability can strengthen organisational performance and sustainability.
Amber has also contributed to industry discussions on innovation, data and digital transformation in aged care, including presenting on data and technology strategy. She brings a practical perspective on what it takes to build scalable capability while allowing providers to retain their independence and community identity.
Independence Through Collaboration: An Alternative to Consolidation
What if the answer to the sustainability of smaller aged care providers isn’t consolidation?
Around 550 of Australia’s approximately 680 residential aged care providers (80%) operate just one to three sites. These organisations are an important part of the diversity, choice and local identity of Australian aged care. Yet they face the same increasing regulatory, financial, workforce and technology demands as much larger organisations, while spreading the cost of specialist capability across a much smaller revenue base.
More than a decade ago, four Central Coast aged care providers tested a different approach.
Rather than merge or build the same capability four times, they combined their back-office finance functions. They remained independent but created shared scale. What began as a team of eight has evolved into a shared finance model supporting more than 20 aged care providers today.
It is a model many organisations consider but few have implemented at scale. Ten years of operating it provides an opportunity to move beyond the theory and ask: does shared scale actually work, what does it take to make it work, and could others do it faster and better?
Amber Witherdin, CEO of PACE, and Greg Williams, Co-CEO of founding provider Alino Living, will bring both sides of that experience to the discussion. Together they will explore:
PACE Care is one example of what is possible. The bigger question is what the sector can learn from it. Groups of independent providers may choose to collaborate and build shared capability in different ways, without each having to spend a decade learning the same lessons.
Scale and independence do not have to be opposites. The future of independent aged care may not be independence in isolation, but independence through collaboration.