Hi, my name is Helen. In this video, I share what, and who was really important to supporting me to move out of the nursing home.
I was in aged care for seven and a half years.
I think as you go through the process, you begin to develop a team that is supporting you in moving out. There’s occupational therapists helping you with the equipment you’ll need and how you’ll do day-to-day tasks. There are support coordinators, there are other support workers. They start to give you a real picture of what it could be like. And you get your own confidence from that. But at the same time, you need to be really clear about what you want and not be overcome by what everyone else thinks about how it could be.
There was a document that was really long, that had to go to the NDIS to get me approved for SDA and for the sort of supports I would need to live here. My support coordinator gave me names of support providers who had a good reputation with the MS Society. So it was important to have that expertise because I have MS.
The housing matching service were just so supportive and encouraging up until I got approved for the unit that I have. They helped me write the applications. They told me what the process was. And they just kept saying, “Well, you can do this if this is what you want.” And that was just so important, I can’t speak highly enough of them. It was just incredible to have people who had helped people in a similar situation before and were speaking from a knowledge base, and were also personally supportive.
You start to develop trust as you start to see the enormous skills of a lot of people that you come into contact with. You begin to get a group that you feel, “Okay, these people know what they're doing. They’ve got real expertise in this. They speak the right language. They speak my language. And they understand what I’m trying to achieve. And they’ll get me through this.”
I had to buy everything online because I couldn’t get out of the nursing home. I had a friend who had room for it to be stored, and they were able to bring it to me on the day. And there were other things like help with moving. Making sure that my son and friends were available on the day to do the actual moving with me, and doing that setting up that needs to happen. Because of course when you move in, it's a blank canvas, there’s nothing there.
It turned out to be a year, which seemed a long time at the time. But unfortunately, the COVID pandemic got in the way. I wasn’t allowed to go out of the nursing home I was in because we were in lockdown. But by July, I was able to visit for two hours exactly and see the place. It was just so great to actually have a picture in my mind of what it would be, and to start to picture myself living there.