The first week, when they've just gone in

When a parent goes into care suddenly — often straight from a hospital ward — it feels like everything has to be done at once. It doesn't. Most of what lands on you in the first week can wait a fortnight without penalty, and knowing which is which is the difference between a hard week and a frantic one.

The things that genuinely can't wait are few. Make sure the aged care home has the person's Medicare number and any existing assessment approval, because a permanent-care claim can't start without them. And if money or forms need signing and you don't yet hold the legal authority to sign, start sorting that now — it's the one thing that takes weeks and blocks everything behind it. Everything else — the pension recalculation, the means assessment, the fee letters, the room agreement — has its own clock, and none of them start on day one.

The single most useful thing you can do this week is not a form. It's a phone call to a free aged care advocate. They sell nothing, they're independent of the home, and their whole job is to help families at exactly this moment work out what's urgent and what's noise. Most people don't know the service exists. Call them before you fill in anything.

Write down, somewhere you won't lose it, the person's Medicare number, their Centrelink Customer Reference Number (CRN), and the name and contact of the aged care home. You'll be asked for these repeatedly over the next month, by different agencies that don't share records with each other.