About Aged Care HQ

Aged Care HQ is an independent Australian site about aged care. We read the official sources and explain what they actually mean.

Why this site exists

It might start with a phone call. A parent has had a fall, the hospital says she is medically fine, and they need the bed back by Thursday. Someone hands you a brochure with an acronym on it. You have got until the weekend to work out what happens next.

The information you need is published, but it is spread across several organisations. My Aged Care has some of it, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has more, Services Australia handles the fees, and the Quality and Safety Commission covers complaints. None of it was written for you, on a Tuesday, with three days to sort something out.

So we gather it up and write it down in plain English.

In our experience, ambiguity causes more trouble here than secrecy does. One page says aged care assessment, another still says ACAT, the name of the Aged Care Assessment Teams that the Single Assessment System replaced. A dollar figure turns up with no date attached, so you cannot tell whether it still applies. A process gets explained without saying who starts it. We try to close those gaps. Where the honest answer is that it depends, we say what it depends on.

Who we are, and how this is paid for

We are an independent publisher. No provider owns us, no health fund pays us, and nobody can pay to appear in what we write.

The site is self-funded at the moment. No ads, no sponsored content, no paid placement. That is true today and it will not hold forever, because research and hosting cost money, and a site nobody pays for stops getting updated.

The likely answer is the provider directory we are building. Every service gets a free listing whether it pays us or not. A provider will be able to pay for extras on a profile they claim and manage, like photos and their own description. What they cannot buy is a higher position in the results, or a softer write-up. Our page for providers has the detail, and any change goes up there before it takes effect.

We have also written about how the comparison sites in this market get paid. Holding other people to a standard means publishing your own.

How we write

• Primary sources first. We cite the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, My Aged Care, Services Australia and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, and we link to them so you can check.
• Dates on the money. Many aged care fees, such as the basic daily fee and the maximum hotelling and non-clinical care contributions, change twice a year, in March and September. Where we publish an amount it carries the date it applies from. Where it would go stale fast, we send you to the official estimator instead.
• Plain English. Acronyms spelled out the first time, and no jargon left sitting there unexplained.
• Checked and dated. Every guide shows when it was last reviewed.

What we are not

We are not a government agency and we are not an aged care provider. We do not arrange care, negotiate for you, or take a fee for sending you to anyone. We are not financial advisers, lawyers or clinicians, and nothing here is advice about your own situation.

Corrections

Aged care fees change over time, and we would rather be told than be wrong. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.