The interface between hospital and residential aged care.

The last 15 years have seen substantial changes in both the aged care and the acute hospital sectors. This article focuses on the impact of those changes on the interface between hospital and residential care. It examines trends in expenditure, supply and patterns of service use in the two sectors. Despite good national databases on hospitals and aged care services, there is little national information on the interface of the two sectors. The material presented here is based on work being undertaken at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, as part of a project aimed at developing a national database linking residential aged care and hospital morbidity data.