As the Illawarra's Baby Boomers turn 80, how do we prepare for their care?

The pair are increasingly concerned about the scale of the aged care problem in the region - which left 1600 people languishing in hospital well past their discharge date in the past 13 months.

This problem is being repeated in hospitals around Australia, but for the past two years has been markedly worse in the Illawarra due to the massive shortfall of aged places.

Read more about the scale of the problem here.

About 500 beds in the region have closed in the last 10 years, while federal Department of Ageing figures showed the region should have 900 more places than currently exist.

Another 1000 places will be needed in the next 10 years to keep pace with the need, Mr Sewell, who is the Community Industry Group's Aged Care Consultant, said.

He said more aged care providers were considering closing beds soon, and that there were only two new facilities - still years away - in the pipeline.

With little able to be done to fix this problem, Ms Sloan said the government needed to look at other ways to provide a safe place for older people.

"Our public hospital system is struggling to cope with older people who are getting who are experiencing significant injuries from simple falls," Ms Sloan said

"Housing clearly plays an important role and currently our system is offering housing which is not suitable for a person who is turning 80 and needs a suitable place to turn 90 and possibly 100.

"More needs to be done to make this a national priority for our oldest Australians a large and growing cohort. "

They say all levels of government need to look at the provision of safe housing for older people.

"We know from the numbers that people who go to hospital return back to their retirement unit from hospital quicker [than those in their own home] because they're socialised in a community of support," Mr Sewell said.

"So they're social and safe in retirement villages - but not many people end up in those, there are not enough of them, and it appears that councils don't set aside land specifically for seniors."

"In all the tens of thousands of new housing lots released, almost none of them are for seniors, housing or retirement housing."

"The cost of maintaining a person in a hospital bed is really high, and the cost of building new hospitals is massive.

"But there is a point, if we don't build new hospitals and don't build new aged care and don't have better housing, where all our hospitals across Illawarra will be chockablock full of older people who've got nowhere else to live."

Their plan includes land allocation by local councils for housing providers to create seniors' housing options, and better financial incentives by federal and state governments to allow for home modification packages and stamp duty exemptions to encourage people to renovate their homes or move from unsuitable, unsafe, lonely places to aged friendly homes.

"It sounds a bit stark, but we actually want the statistics - the bleeding obvious and the demographic destiny that applies to all of us - to be embraced," Mr Sewell said.

"We're challenging them to think about the demographics and to report on what they're doing about it."

"Because even though the numbers are enormous, the numbers of older people in our cities and our communities has only just started to grow.

"The first of the Baby Boomers turn 80 next year - so for the next 20 years, from 80 to 100 that's that massive population boom moving through."