feisty
Australian women in aged care are running major providers, directing accreditation bodies, and testifying at the federal level as the sector works through the most substantial regulatory overhaul it has seen in a generation. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety delivered its final report in 2021, and the reforms it triggered are still reshaping how Australia delivers care to its oldest residents. The women steering that process deserve to be named.
Why aged care leadership matters right now
Aged care in Australia is a $27 billion sector serving more than 1.3 million people. It is also predominantly staffed and led by women, yet the executives setting strategy and the advocates shaping legislation are less visible than their counterparts in banking or technology. That gap is closing. Several women currently head the largest non-government providers in the country, and others are embedded in the regulatory and policy machinery that will determine what Australian aged care looks like by the end of the decade.
The sector's reform agenda is specific and time-bound. The Support at Home program, which replaces the Home Care Packages program, requires providers to restructure funding models, workforce arrangements, and quality reporting. Getting that wrong costs residents. The women listed here are the ones responsible for getting it right.
Executives leading major providers
Patricia Sparrow is the CEO of Aged and Community Care Providers Association (ACCPA), the peak body representing residential and home care providers across Australia. Sparrow leads the sector's primary advocacy organisation at a moment when providers are negotiating workforce wages, new care standards, and the financial viability questions that flow from the transition to the Support at Home model. ACCPA speaks directly to government and to the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and Sparrow's role puts her at the centre of every significant policy negotiation in the sector.
Merle Mitchell AM has spent decades in aged care governance and consumer advocacy. Mitchell has served on multiple national bodies focused on older Australians' rights, and her work on consumer-directed care helped shift the conversation from facility-centred to person-centred delivery. Her influence on how Australia thinks about aged care choice is practical and documented.
Robyn Batten, CEO of Southern Cross Care NSW and ACT, runs one of the largest not-for-profit aged care organisations on the eastern seaboard. Southern Cross Care operates residential facilities and home care services across two jurisdictions. Batten manages workforce challenges, capital projects, and the regulatory compliance load that the new quality standards impose on providers of that scale.
Sue Hendy leads Whiddon, a not-for-profit provider operating across regional and rural NSW. Rural aged care faces distinct staffing and infrastructure pressures that metropolitan providers do not. Hendy's work at Whiddon addresses those gaps directly, including workforce pipelines in areas where recruitment from a thin local labour market is a structural constraint, not a management failure.
Regulators and policy makers
Janet Anderson PSM served as the inaugural Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner from 2019, overseeing the Commission's establishment during the Royal Commission period. Her tenure covered the most intensive scrutiny the sector has ever faced. Anderson built the regulatory architecture that now governs provider registration, compliance assessment, and the star rating system that gives the public visibility into care quality.
Carolyn Smith chairs the Aged Care Quality and Safety Advisory Council, the body that provides independent expert guidance to the Commission. Smith's background spans clinical governance and consumer representation. She works at the intersection of clinical evidence and regulatory design, which is exactly where the hardest reform questions sit.
The intersection of aged care policy and broader health leadership is also where several of the women profiled in our coverage of Australian women in health: the executives leading the sector operate, particularly those running hospital networks with significant sub-acute and transition care programs that feed directly into aged care pathways.
Workforce advocates and sector builders
Annie Butler is the Federal Secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, which represents the largest workforce group in residential aged care. Butler has been one of the most prominent voices in the campaign for sector-wide pay rises for aged care workers, a campaign that produced the Fair Work Commission's 2023 pay decision and its follow-on determinations. Wages in aged care are not an abstract policy matter. They determine whether the sector can recruit and retain enough staff to meet care minutes requirements. Butler's work on this is specific and consequential.
Kerri Rivett heads Meaningful Ageing Australia, the organisation that promotes person-centred spiritual care and wellbeing programs in aged care settings. Rivett's work addresses a dimension of care quality that accreditation frameworks often measure poorly: whether residents experience purpose, connection, and dignity on a daily basis. Her organisation has influenced training frameworks and quality guidance across the sector.
What the reform era reveals
The aged care sector's leadership is not uniform. Not-for-profit providers face different pressures than for-profit ones. Residential care has different regulatory obligations than home care. Regional providers operate in labour markets that bear no resemblance to those in Sydney or Melbourne. The women listed here reflect that diversity. They are not interchangeable. Each leads a distinct organisation facing a distinct set of constraints.
What they share is a sector in active transition. The new Aged Care Act, which took effect in 2024, shifted the legal framework from a provider-focused model to a rights-based one. Every organisation in the sector is now required to demonstrate that residents' rights, not organisational convenience, are the organising principle of care delivery. Implementing that shift at scale, with an underpaid workforce and a capital stock that in many cases needs replacement, is the work these women are doing.
The leadership challenges in aged care overlap with those across the broader health and social services sector. The governance questions, especially around board accountability when care quality fails, closely mirror the dynamics covered in our analysis of Australian women in government: the ministers and secretaries to know, where several portfolios directly govern aged care funding and standards at the federal level.
The next round of provider registrations under the new Act will be the first real test of whether the regulatory architecture built since 2021 has teeth. The women running major providers and the women overseeing compliance will be on opposite sides of that process. Both groups are shaping what Australian aged care becomes.