What do aged care leaders need to meet quality and safety challenges?

Leadership is a puzzle, and many pieces need to fit together to ensure quality and safe care services. Leaders in aged care, such as nursing homes, residential aged care homes, and homecare services, face significant challenges with increasing demands from aging populations, labor shortages, financial constraints, and increased complexity [ 1 , 2 ]. Aged care organizations can lack the capacity to cope with these challenges and leaders struggle with reducing risk. A consequence is that rates of adverse events are persistently high [ 3 ]. Innovative solutions and new leadership skills are needed to handle the capacity-demand gaps, while at the same time delivering quality care. We argue that part of the solution is for aged care services to focus on their leaders, identify what their main leadership challenges are, and support them with tools, training and competence development so they can promote quality and safety for both workers and patients. Leaders in aged care may span from frontline leaders, head of departments, to leaders of larger organizations and all the way up to policy and ministry of health level. In this editorial we focus on frontline leaders and head of departments and organizations like a nursing home or a homecare unit. In the following, we first describe key leadership challenges from the literature and then discuss what is needed to be an effective quality and safety leader in aged care.