Moving house with a Support at Home plan

Moving in your eighties is a bigger undertaking than moving at forty, and the part that catches people out is not the removalist. It is the fortnight after the boxes arrive, when the house is unfamiliar and the support has not started yet.

This guide is general information, not financial or legal advice. Your own agreement and your own plan govern your situation.

Two things move at different speeds

Almost every difficulty here comes from treating the funding and the provider as one thing.

The funding approval is yours and it is national. Being assessed and approved does not tie you to a postcode, and crossing a state border does not undo it.

The provider is local. Home care is delivered by people who drive to you, so every provider works within defined areas. Yours may cover the new suburb. It may not. This is the single question to ask first, and to ask before you sign anything to do with the new house if you can.

Aldera works in specific areas of New South Wales, and we will tell you plainly whether a new address is one of them rather than promising and sorting it out later.

Six weeks out

• Ring your provider and tell them. Give them the address and the date. Ask two questions and write down the answers: do you cover the new area, and what notice does my agreement require.
• Read the agreement. Specifically the notice period and anything about ending the arrangement. How to read a home care agreement before you sign covers what those clauses usually say.
• Check where your unspent funds sit. Your quarterly statement shows what has accumulated and what it can be used for. Take a copy of the most recent one before anything changes. What your quarterly Support at Home statement should show explains how to read it.
• Update My Aged Care. Your address is how everything else finds you, including any future assessment. Do it once, early, at myagedcare.gov.au.

Four weeks out, if you are changing provider

This is a switch, and a switch has its own steps. How to switch aged care providers without losing your funding sets them out properly, but the ordering rule is worth repeating here.

Line the new provider up before you finish with the old one. The gap is what hurts, and it is entirely avoidable. Agree a start date with the incoming provider first, then give notice to the outgoing one so the two overlap rather than leaving a fortnight of nothing in a house you do not know yet.

Ask the new provider to visit before the move if they can. Fifteen minutes in the new bathroom tells them more than a phone call about it will.

Two weeks out

Sort the things that are hard to do once everything is in boxes.

Change the address with the GP, the pharmacy and any specialist, and ask whether they will keep seeing you or whether you need a transfer. Work out which pharmacy you will use at the other end, because a single pharmacy holding the whole medication picture is worth protecting through a move. Book the GP appointment for the week after the move rather than hoping to get one.

Keep the medication list, the key documents and anything to do with care out of the packing system entirely, in one bag that travels with the person rather than on the truck. Documents worth sorting before you need them is the list of what that bag should hold.

The new house is a different house

This is the part people skip, and it is where the falls happen.

The bathroom layout is different. The step at the back door is a different height. The kitchen things are in cupboards that have not been learned yet, so there is more reaching and more stooping for the first month. At night, in an unfamiliar hallway, the route to the toilet is no longer automatic.

Walk the new place before the furniture goes in and decide where the rails, the lighting and the clear paths need to be. An occupational therapist can do that walk with you and is worth asking for. The home safety checklist is the version you can do yourself.

Unpack the bedroom, the bathroom and one chair first. A person can live around boxes for a fortnight. They cannot live around an unmade bed.

After the move

Give it three or four weeks, then look at whether the support still fits. Often it does not, and not because anyone got it wrong. A smaller place may need less domestic help and more transport, or the other way around. That is a normal reason to ask for a plan review.

Where consistency earns its keep

A move is exactly the moment when everything held in one worker’s head gets lost.

At Aldera the routine, the preferences, the things that have gone wrong before and the way somebody likes their morning to run sit in the One Story record rather than in a person, so they survive a change of address and a change of team. Where we cover the new area, the same small Care Circle approach starts again there. Where we do not, we will say so and help you hand over properly.

For approvals, addresses and what your funding covers, start at myagedcare.gov.au.