Frequently Asked Questions

A good starting point is to either contact your local GP or My Aged Care on 1800 200 422 to discuss your current needs and circumstances so that they can refer you for an assessment.

A local Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT) that is usually a nurse, social worker or another health care professional will make a time to come to your home and talk to you about your current situation and assess you for government funded aged care services. The outcome of this assessment can take anywhere from 48 hours to 12 weeks depending on how urgent your situation is deemed.

If you are assessed as eligible for entry into an aged care home, you will receive an approval letter and support plan from your ACAT that sets out the care you are approved to receive.

When you’ve met with an ACAS and received a letter confirming your eligibility for residential aged care, you can start looking for your future home.

Each home has different kinds of accommodation, care, services, and activities. It’s wise to visit several different homes to find one that suits you best. The website www.myagedcare.gov.au has a ‘finder’ to help you look for homes in the area you’d like to live and contact them to organise a visit.

To be eligible for residential respite care you must have an ACAS completed which assess your eligibility for respite.  An ACAS assessment can be arranged through My Aged Care.

Once eligible for respite you can access up to 63 days of subsidised care in a financial year. This includes both planned and emergency residential respite care. 

It is possible to extend this by 21 days at a time, with further approval from your aged care assessor. This may be required due to your care needs, carer stress, or the absence of your carer.

During your respite stay, you will be entitled to the same care and support services as permanent residents. For instance, you will be given a room and hotel-type services such as meals, laundry, and social activities, as well as services to meet your personal and care needs. 

Based on your initial ACAT assessment, you will be approved for either low- or high-level care. This will determine the level of respite subsidy your provider will receive, and ensure you receive care appropriate to your needs. Being approved for high level care allows you to access low level care, but not vice-versa.

At Holloway all our vacant rooms can be used for respite care or permanent care meaning that if a resident comes in for respite care and wants to transition to permanent care, they can do this immediately post their respite stay. We believe this allows more flexibility and options for your stay.

Residents are entitled to 52 days of social leave in a financial year. Residents can also take extra social leave. However, the Government will not pay the subsidy for those days.

To count as social leave, the resident must stay overnight somewhere else. A resident can spend every weekend in a year on social leave.

During social leave, the Government will continue to pay the subsidy to you on behalf of the resident.

The resident will continue to pay agreed fees and daily accommodation costs.

If the resident goes over their 52 days of leave, the Government won’t pay the subsidy for those days.

This means you can now ask the resident to pay a fee to reserve their place in your service. This fee is in addition to their agreed fees and daily accommodation costs.

Social leave details are in Section 42-2 and Section 52C-5 of the Aged Care Act 1997.

Residents who go to hospital are entitled to unlimited days of hospital leave.

While on hospital leave, the resident continues to pay their agreed fees and daily accommodation costs.

The Government will continue to pay the subsidy. The payment will reduce to 50% of the subsidy from day 29 of a resident’s hospital leave.

Once the subsidy has been reduced, the resident will continue to pay their agreed Sreduction to the resident’s means-tested care fee, if they pay one.

Hospital leave details are in:

• Section 42-2 of the Aged Care Act 1997
• Section 9 of the Aged Care (Subsidy, Fees, and Payments) Determination 2014

An aged care home might ask you to leave if: 

• they are closing
• they can’t provide the kind of accommodation and care you need
• your needs have changed since you first moved in
• you no longer need the care they provide, or
• you haven’t paid your fees within 42 days of the due date, for reasons within your control.
• You may also be asked to leave if you intentionally cause:
• serious damage to the aged care home, or
• serious injury to another person, including employees.

If you do have to move, you should be given 14 days’ written notice. The aged care home should be able to help identify affordable alternative accommodation that better meets your needs.

In some cases, you could be moved to another room without requesting it if: 

• it is necessary for medical reasons
• your room in the home changes to an ‘extra service room’ and you choose not to pay the additional costs
• you change between low-level and high-level residential care. (For this to happen, you may be assessed by an ACAS or at least two medical or other health practitioners to see whether you would benefit from the change)
• repairs or improvements are being made to the aged care home, or
• the home asks you to move beds or rooms and you agree, after you’ve been fully consulted without being pressured.

You may be satisfied with your aged care home but want to change rooms. The manager of your home must consider your request, even if they can’t offer you another room straight away.

The manager will consider the overall operation of the home, as well as the terms of your agreement, and let you know if there is another room that might be suitable.

Organisations providing Commonwealth subsidised aged care services are required to comply with the Aged Care Quality Standards (Quality Standards). Organisations will be assessed and must be able to provide evidence of their compliance with and performance against the Quality Standards from 1 July 2019.

The Quality Standards focus on outcomes for consumers and reflect the level of care and services the community can expect from organisations that provide Commonwealth subsidised aged care services.

The Quality Standards are made up of eight individual standards:

1. Consumer dignity and choice
2. Ongoing assessment and planning with consumers
3. Personal care and clinical care
4. Services and supports for daily living
5. Organisation’s service environment
6. Feedback and complaints
7. Human resources
8. Organisational governance.

Each of the Quality Standards is expressed in three ways:

• a statement of outcome for the consumer
• a statement of expectation for the organisation
• organisational requirements to demonstrate that the standard has been met.

Compliance with the Quality Standards is mandatory from the date of commencement. Organisations are required to demonstrate performance on an ongoing basis to meet Australian Government requirements. The Australian Government may act when providers do not comply. This includes under aged care legislation or through the funding agreement with the organisation.

The Standards provide a framework of core requirements for quality and safety. Some Standards will apply differently to organisations, depending on the types of care and services they provide. Many organisations will go beyond these core requirements to provide a higher quality of care and services for consumers.

Aged care providers do their best to provide quality care and services for older Australians. When issues do occur, it’s important that people can raise their concerns in a constructive and safe way.

An effective complaint handling system within an aged care service:

• allows many issues to be dealt with promptly, effectively and sustainably 
• can enhance the ongoing relationship between the service and the consumer, their family and representatives 
• contributes to continuous improvement in the service. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (Commission) supports the industry in resolving complaints within their service where possible. Effective resolution of complaints leads to improved aged care services for older Australians.

It is also a legislative requirement under the Aged Care Act 1997 and the Aged Care Quality Standards, that every service has an internal complaints resolution process.

Open disclosure is the open discussion that a service provider has with a consumer when something goes wrong and has harmed or had the potential to cause harm to the consumer. This discussion may also involve the consumer’s family, carers, other support people and representatives, when a consumer would like them to be involved. In relation to open disclosure, the Commission will assess a service provider’s performance against the relevant requirements under the Aged Care Quality Standards. This includes, Standard 6, Requirement (3)(c) and where clinical care is provided, Standard 8, Requirement 3(e). In doing so, the Commission will seek to understand how organisations have applied open disclosure in their service.

Practising open disclosure is:

• Communicating with a consumer when things go wrong 
• Listening to the consumer’s experience of what has happened 
• Apologising and explaining the steps the service has taken to prevent it happening again

This means that workers need to be able to manage privacy, comfort and general care given to patients, assess health status, identify any serious threat, and be able to utilise health information to the extent reasonable.

One way in which duty of care is upheld is with an aged care assessment team. This is a team of allied health professionals (medical, nursing, etc) that assesses health status and a number of needs of elderly people, in order to help both them and their carers in maximising quality of life.

These needs include:

• Physical
• Cultural
• Social
• Medical
• • Restorative

In aged care, both information privacy and privacy as a whole are important.

Protecting patient privacy is something that should be prioritised across all aged care providers – the right approach to privacy is necessary as it ensures that basic moral requirements of patients, family members and all relevant persons are met.

Moreover, privacy is crucial in aged care as a result of the nature of the industry – this is true when considering care providers collecting personal information, the necessity of medical records, the close environments of patients and staff, and the involvement of families and any other relevant third parties.

Australian privacy principles and laws are designed to uphold privacy standards in a way that ensures the comfort and assurance of all aged care stakeholders. This means that aged care centres are required to adhere to strict requirements when they collect personal information, as well as when they disclose health information.

Ultimately, aged care is about providing people with a safe environment to live their final days or years. Thus, it’s important that your loved one has a sense of privacy and control over how they live, what they share, who they share it with, and how much information they disclose to others.

When it comes to the enforcement and maintaining of personal information control and use within aged care, there are a number of processes that are often utilised:

• Regular training and awareness
• Thorough confidentiality agreements and policies
• Extension of all privacy and confidentiality policies to partners and other stakeholders
• Implementation of appropriate information storage mediums and security measures.
• Restrictions on usage of mobile phones
• Thoughtful layout of rooms and overall facility
• Asking before touching patients in any way
• Demonstrating politeness within everyday tasks
• Privacy and confidentiality laws and regulations
• Giving patients control over their personal space, belongings, and rooms.
• Transparency around the involvement of healthcare professionals and other health providers

Accreditation is a key component of the aged care regulatory environment established by the Aged Care Act 1997. Accreditation seeks to assess the quality and care of services delivered by approved providers against the Quality Standards and contributes to improved safety, quality and continuous improvement of services.