Home care is not on the radar of people exploring their retirement living options until they actually need it, according to a survey from our sister company DCM Research.
As part of the project, Australian Online Research (AOR) conducted in-depth interviews with 2,271 Australians over the age of 60.
Interestingly, home care/support was simply not on the agenda of most respondents.
Take a look at this table below:
And you can see, only 12% of respondents aged 60+ had given home care any real extensive thought.
AOR found 38% had only thought about their needs somewhat and 50% hadn’t given their future home care needs any thought at all.
A lot of the reasoning behind this is the sense of unknown.
To put it simply, people just don’t know what will be needed, for whom and when, making it extremely difficult to plan for these needs in advance.
This is another reason why retirement villages are a compelling option.
Villages give you a chance to move to a more manageable lifestyle – and there are many villages with integrated aged care facilities or home care services, that can further assist your needs when the time comes.
Home care is one of those things that will creep up on you. But giving the topic a little bit of thought ahead of time means that when the day finally comes, you’ll have options.
For more information about the types of home care packages available, visit Aged Care 101.