Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Health): In response to the first part of the member's question, I've been advised that between July 2021 and June 2022, 438 aged residential care beds out of about 40,000 have been disestablished. For completeness, individual aged residential care beds at a facility level can be made unavailable for a number of reasons, including staff shortages, staff illness, or other staff absenteeism. Some facilities will stop taking residents and will gradually decrease the number of beds available over time when a staffing shortage persists. This can occur over a number of weeks or months, before increasing the number of available beds again as staffing levels increase. For these reasons, the numbers of beds that are available or unavailable on any given day are fluctuating at the provider level. In response to the second part of the member's question, aged residential care nurses are employed by individual facilities, so information about the shortfall of nurses or vacancies cannot be verified. However, the most recent advice I have is that there is a shortfall of around 900 nurses in the aged residential care sector. I would also note that the New Zealand Aged Care Association has accepted a 5.5 percent price uplift on their funding contract for this year. The revised offer is effective from 1 September 2022.