Aged care keeps searching for workforce solutions. Better rostering, higher pay, more intense psychometrics, shinier recruitment campaigns. All fine. But until we understand why people stay, leave, thrive, or quietly disengage, we're just rearranging deck chairs. The answers are always found in human behavioural science. It's time to start asking the right questions.
Dr Darren Coppin is a behavioural scientist, founder, and arguably one of the more persistent people in the business of understanding why humans do what they do - particularly when it comes to work, wellbeing, and the organisations that depend on getting both right.
With a PhD grounded in behavioural change and a career spanning employment services, justice, disability, defence and aged care, Darren has spent three decades turning psychological theory into practical tools that actually make a difference. At scale.
He is the founder of Esher House (now floated as part of ReadyTech), Azurum and the developer of OPUS. This is a 3-minute workforce-matching tool built specifically for the aged care and NDIS sectors that reduces assessment time by up to 50 minutes per candidate and achieving 100% concordance with experts in pilot trials. His earlier Assessment of Work Readiness instrument has been completed over 250,000 times across seven countries, with clients reporting a 42% improvement in employment outcomes.
Darren consults to departments and organisations including Feros Care and The BUSY Group, and collaborates with globally recognised scholars in positive psychology and wellbeing policy - including Lindsay Oades, Martin Seligman, Richard Layard, and his dearly departed mentor, Felicia Huppert. He is finally completing his book, It's All BS (Behavioural Science), and contributing to global policy frameworks that place workforce experience and wellbeing at the centre of sector sustainability.
His core belief is unfashionably simple: aged care doesn't have a workforce crisis so much as a behavioural science deficit. Fix that, and most of the rest follows. Find the right little levers and you WILL deliver big, positive change.
