Editorial guides
Practical articles, checklists and explanations built around Italian aged care homes, urgent placement, waiting lists and home-care decisions.
Featured guide
The real gate is not a queue — it is the assessment and the paperwork behind it. How ACAT approval, means testing and hospital discharge decide who gets a room, and what actually moves things faster.
Overgrown nails change how she walks, and how she walks is why she falls. A GP care plan unlocks Medicare-subsidised podiatry most families never claim, and DVA covers more. Six questions to ask.
Untreated hearing loss looks like dementia and makes it worse. In aged care the device ends up in the drawer with a flat battery. Eligible pensioners get devices and maintenance covered — and providers visit homes. Six questions.
With dementia the language learned second goes first. Australia is the one place where the answer is clear and funded: providers can book a free national interpreter. Most never do, because nobody asks. Six questions to change that.
When someone says "tube", families think the choice is between feeding her and giving up. It is not. What a speech pathology assessment should establish first, who pays for allied health in aged care, and six questions to ask.
The basic daily fee is pegged to the age pension, which means a fixed share is still hers to spend. Who can manage it if she cannot, how the home should account for it, and why financial coercion by staff is a reportable incident.
Australian aged care homes are air conditioned — until the power goes out on a 42-degree day. What the provider must plan for, which medications raise the risk, and the six questions worth asking in October rather than January.
Australia has something most countries do not — a national immunisation register that records every dose. Here is how to get your mother's history statement, who can consent if she cannot, and the three vaccines nobody chases.
Residents keep their own GP in aged care — on paper. In practice many GPs no longer visit, and families find out slowly. What the provider must arrange, what an advance care directive changes, and six questions to ask.
Continence care is a Quality Standard, not a supply decision. And if pads replaced help getting to the toilet because there was nobody to help, that is a staffing answer to a clinical question — and the care minutes are reported.
Most read
The real gate is not a queue — it is the assessment and the paperwork behind it. How ACAT approval, means testing and hospital discharge decide who gets a room, and what actually moves things faster.
How the former home is treated in the aged care means assessment and the pension, when to sell versus rent versus keep, and how the RAD decision interacts with the house.
How the new Support at Home program works, what it funds, when home care stops being enough, and how families decide between staying home and moving into residential care.
Funded residential respite days, what it costs, booking in practice, emergency respite when a carer collapses, and using respite as a trial run for permanent care.
