I was dreading the day that I had to say, mom, you've got to leave this place and go somewhere else. But the staff reassured us that this was now the opportunity to find her a residential aged care placement that would not be traumatic for her.

And they were exactly right. The staff helped us help her, but we needed as much help as she did.

I'm David Everett, and I was my mother, Gabriel's carer. She was a woman of her era. My mum. She not only achieved in work, but she was really into the arts of all kinds. We all had a blessed childhood due to mom's efforts, I noticed that she was having some struggles with higher cognitive tasks and needed more and more care on her journey with vascular dementia.

In Australia, the population is definitely aging. And we have increasing numbers of people who are requiring government funded aged care support to live either at home or in residential aged care. 

Hi, I am Jill Harvey. I am one of the deputy directors in the Caring Futures Institute at Flinders University.

When older people move to a different setting. Family are often the ones who hold everything together and advocate for the older person, but they really do need to be provided with good information. And when that happens, well that makes the process so much better. 

A few years into the journey one evening she must have had a fall, fractured her hip.

She was in hospital and orthopaedics passed her on to the gym, the geriatric evaluation and management unit, and we had three weeks there, which was this beautiful breathing space with informed staff to make a decision. 

Could she go back to the retirement village? Or did she need to enter aged care? 

And it became rapidly apparent she had to go to aged care, but then there were system problems, like her GP didn't visit that home, so we had to rearrange all her general practice care.

So there's quite a lot involved when we talk about transitions in care, we are really thinking about when people move from one service to another. 

So for example, for older people, if they've been in hospital, when they move to a different setting, whether that's a residential aged care home or going back to their own home. 

That really is a time when the person is quite vulnerable. It's really important when we're thinking about what a good transition looks like for an aged care provider, it is really to realise that it's not about us, it's about the resident or client who's involved in the transition.

And when we're evaluating to work out was it good or not, it really is about, was the transition safe? 

Did they feel safe? And were they safe? Were they supported? 

I am Esther Westra and I lead the residential and home services teams here at Southern Cross Care, SANT and Vic. In the role of executive services.

We've been working through aged care transitions for many years, and at the crux of it, it is really about communication. 

So in terms of a good transition, there is no magic solution, but there are a set of principles I think that research has highlighted. 

We are working on a project called Optimal.

So someone who's probably been living at home, being in hospital, but now needs to move to residential aged care. We've done a number of things to ensure that that move from hospital to the residential care home is as smooth and supported as possible. 

In terms of current practice around transitions, there are lots of good things happening in the services.

One of the things that we've implemented a while ago now is a process called Smooth Transitions, and that's just acknowledging that people are making the transition from hospital into residential care often in a time of crisis. 

And we need to be really careful about how we're supporting that, that people have the information that they need.

Everybody deserves access to high quality, equitable care. And that particularly applies to a generation where the population is aging. And we are actually going to really need to think ahead to the next 20, 30 years. 

How do we actually deliver the care that is required, because that will be all of us one day.