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Introduction
Aged Care Australia is the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing’s premier online source of information for everything you need to know about aged care. Aged Care Australia provides the community with access to government and non-government information and services. It will help the community to make informed decisions about aged care options for themselves and their family members.
To enable consumers to easily navigate the plethora of aged care information available, the website has been arranged based on five questions:
- Need to know where to start?
- Need help staying at home?
- Need help with aged care homes?
- Need help for carers and family? and
- Need help with health?
This client focussed approach to the website greatly enhances the navigation and usability – coupled with content that has been carefully written in a consumer-friendly voice, this will assist consumer’s needs and understanding of the aged care system in Australia. Hours of consumer testing has ensured that this site will be the best source of aged care information online.
Site Interactive Features
Aged Care Australia hosts many great features. Some of them are:
Aged Care Home Finder
For the first time ever, consumers can search online for aged care homes in their local area. This interactive tool can provide them with details on the home and even photographs. Consumers can also compare several homes against each other. The information is supplied by the aged care homes themselves and is provided in an unbiased and non-commercial way.
Next step: Aged Care Home Finder
Community Care Service Finder
For those needing help staying at home, this interactive tool allows consumers to search for care services in their local area.
Next step: Community Care Service Finder
Common questions
Throughout the website there are a number of commonly asked questions on aged care. The answers to these thought provoking questions will provide consumers with a new insight on situations many people experience.
My page
The My Page feature of the website allows consumers to store material they have selected from the site. When they return to the site they can access this information again or update it. They can even share it with family and friends.
Developmental Approach
This release of agedcareaustralia.gov.au was developed following an extensive market research, community and industry consultation process where the Department sought to find out what it was that the Australians community wanted from the site. Through these processes the Department talked to people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, people from rural, regional, remote and urban areas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with differing levels of skill in using computers and the Internet. This process means that by listening to you we have been able to make Aged Care Australia meet your needs.
Accessibility
Aged Care Australia has been designed to be an accessible site in compliance with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 at Priority Level 2, making the site usable for a wide range of people with particular needs and for users using software such as text browsers and screen readers. If you want more details about the accessibility features of Aged Care Australia please visit our page on Accessibility features.
Read more: About the accessibility features
Low Bandwidth Users
Not all users of the Internet have access to high bandwidth, broadband connections. Aged Care Australia has been designed with users of slower Internet access technologies, such as dial up modems, in mind. Aged Care Australia has been designed:
- with smaller page sizes - for example, most pages are only 16-18 kB in size
- to be fully usable if you turn off the loading of images, stylesheets and javascript, and
- so that components such as stylesheets and images are 'cacheable' - this means you only download them once, not every time you open a page.
If you have any questions about the site, or if you have an idea about how the site could work better for you, or if you require more information please contact us.