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Help for people with particular needs
If you’re an older person who has a particular need we may be able to provide services, programs and information that can help. For example, you may have specific cultural, language or health requirements – or you could be a veteran, suffering from financial hardship or live in a rural or remote area. Whatever your need, this part of our website is for you.
Cultural and identified needs
If you’re an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person or from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, a veteran, a financially disadvantaged person or a person living with a disability or living in a rural or regional area, then this part of our website introduces you to services and programs that are relevant to you.
Read more: About cultural and identified needs
Particular health conditions
If you have a specific health condition such as dementia (more information), a condition requiring palliative care (more information), a chronic disease (more information), continence issues (more information) or living with a mental health condition, this part of our website introduces you to services and programs that can help with your particular condition.
Read more: About particular health conditions
Improving Aged Care for Forgotten Australians
Forgotten Australians include care leavers, former child migrants and people from the Stolen Generations. Care leaver means a person who was in institutional care or other form of out-of-home care, including foster care, as a child or youth (or both) at some time during the 20th century. Aged care has been raised as an area of particular anxiety for Forgotten Australians, given their previous experiences in institutional care.On 16 November 2009, the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivered an apology to Forgotten Australians. The apology can be found on the former Prime Minister’s archived website. The apology outlined a number of initiatives in support of the Forgotten Australians and stated that “service providers need to act in an appropriate and responsive manner towards care leavers.” The first initiative was to include care leavers as a special needs group for aged care purposes. Effective from 1 December 2009, changes were made to the Allocations Principles 1997 under the Aged Care Act 1997 to include ‘care leavers’ as a special needs group.
The Department of Health and Ageing is also developing a National Education Package to raise the awareness of service providers about the needs of Forgotten Australians. More information on this project can be found on the Department of Health and Ageing website.
