The Better Age is a company that provides general GP services with ongoing nursing assistance by visiting residents of aged care facilities within the Toowoomba city area.
What does The Better Age do better?
We understand that many elderly residents have difficulties visiting GP practices with or without their family support. Therefore, our team visits the residents, in their rooms, on-site at the aged-care facility. By visiting the residents, unwell residents can still be seen in their rooms by our GP and nurses, without unnecessarily being transferred to the hospital.
Our team visits the aged care facility on a weekly basis. Although you may not see us visiting the same resident every week, we are on-site weekly to review the residents in need. The weekly review list is generated according to each facility’s clinical nursing report, acute health changes in our residents, and general resident need. Residents can also discuss specific health concerns with facility nurses to book a consultation with the GP, during our regular weekly visit. The weekly review list must be submitted each week by the stipulated time for consultations to occur in the same week.
Our team believes in open communication between our residents, facility nursing team, a resident’s health decision personnel, and the acute health management team specialising in aged care residents (e.g. Darling Down AGES and SPACE team and on-site visiting geriatricians). This is an important factor in providing good medical care to our residents in aged care facilities. The Better Age has its own nursing team to communicate and work collaboratively with other multidisciplinary health teams on a day-to-day basis, This means we can, follow up on health matters that can then be treated with clinical nursing care, and/or feedback to a GP for further medical treatment if required. In addition, the outcomes of the medical intervention will be reported back to the GP in a timely matter to evaluate the effects, this makes medical treatments more effective when acute health changes occurred in our residents.
As well as general GP services, our GP can provide on-site skin checks for residents’ concerns and can undertake their initial skin biopsy in the aged care facilities, if possible, otherwise, referral to a Toowoomba local skin clinic can be done at the resident’s request.
Our GP is passionate about providing good palliative care and end-of-life care to the aged care residents in a homely environment (such as: in their room at the facility with family support around). Residents on End-of-life care will be reviewed more often by the GP, and family support can be facilitated by our team nurses and GP if needed.
Facilities
At the moment, the better age team looks after four facilities in Toowoomba, which are:
Salem nursing home in Hume Street
Salem nursing home in North Ridge
Infinite Care Mount Lofty
Palm Lake Care in Cranley
Our weekly visit times for the four facilities are:
Salem nursing home in Hume Street – Friday early morning
Salem nursing home in North Ridge – Friday Midday
Infinite Care Mount Lofty – Friday afternoon
Palm Lake Care in Cranley – Monday late afternoon