Nude calendar raised $11,000 to reopen aged care home in NSW's Monaro region

The efforts a community has made to reopen an aged care home that had been empty since April 2022 deserve recognition.

Currawarna Aged Care home was opened in the 1970s and former nurse Rosie Gillespie-Jones said it became a community fixture.

"This was their [the residents'] home and this was our little home together where we cared so deeply for them that they became like family," she said.

In February 2022, Southern Cross Care announced the 33-bed aged care facility would shut blaming "staffing shortages", so the 24 residents had to move. The closest suitable aged care homes were at least an hour's drive away with residents forced to move to Canberra and Pambula. Others moved almost 500km away to Sydney.

When Currawarna shut in April 2022, former manager Karen Brownlie and a group "of really tough people" met to brainstorm solutions. Local farmer Keith Campbell, who has a PhD in agribusiness, joined the committee.

Keith proposed reopening the aged care centre as an assisted living facility under NSW legislation, which could support elderly citizens with low or medium-level care when they could no longer manage living at home.

"[The model] removes some of the very onerous regulation that's required for a full-blown high-care residential aged care facility," he said.

"By operating under the Boarding House Act, the facility becomes or remains the home of the individual and the individual therefore can access all government support that they would normally receive in their own homes.

"All of a sudden we had a model that was able to support the lower end of the economic demographic that we have here in Bombala."

Keith felt they needed $1 million to get the facility running again.

"To get that sort of money from the government, the community had to show a willingness to support the proposal themselves," he said.

"[I] suggested that if we could raise $100,000 we would have at least a fair chance of getting the rest."

The community raised nearly $350,000, including $11,000 in sales from a calendar featuring scantily-clad members of the committee who saved Currawarna.

"It actually grabbed the attention of the politicians or the bureaucrats, whereas if I'd gone in knocking on the doors or tried to get their attention it would have been a much harder thing," Keith said.

"It's a little childish but it got their attention."

With $340,000 under their belt, the board lobbied the NSW government, which granted $840,000 to help Currawarna Assisted Living open in February.

A third of the 29 rooms at Currawarna are currently filled.

Keith, now chair of Currawarna Assisted Living, feels the model could offer a solution for struggling regional facilities.

"That's a lot of regional towns throughout the whole of Australia that will lose their aged care unless they can remodel or reinvigorate it on a community bases," he said.

"The increase in regulation, the requirements for 24-hour-a-day registered nurses, increases in wages and the fact that funding hadn't increased along with inflation meant that most facilities [are] operating at a cash-flow deficit right through.

"Either the funding has to change, or the facilities will close."

The Currawarna board has already been in touch with communities such as Berridale and Gundagai, which are interested in its model.