Finding an aged care home placement for a loved one is quite stressful and very time consuming. Last year I had this experience with my father. The government web site recommends that you apply to as many aged care homes as possible. This includes phone calls, leaving messages, and visiting these facilities. Filling out application forms to one facility is time consuming, let alone to multiple facilities. Sometimes phone calls are not answered, messages left are not replied to. This in turn leads to more calls being made, unnecessarily. On top of this you also have to include all the phone calls to government departments (My Aged Care.
Choices of Aged Care Homes are made on various factors - such as RN staffing ratios, the type of care provided (eg dementia), cost, closeness to family, if the need is urgent, etc. To help in the decision making process it would be useful to have an idea of which facilities have a bed available, or how long their waitlist is. This would make the process easier, and I wish this was available at the time I was making these decisions for my father who needed an aged care facility rather quickly. I would not have applied or contacted the facilities that had long wait lists or no bed availability in the long term.