FESTER...that was hilarious :) please contribute more more more!

Good work, Bryan
As an oldie who has recently been to a palliative care ward, I wish to advise you that there is solution that you may like to follow up.
The Sydney South West area of NSW Health has a planning program called "Advance Care Planning Program" on a website at www.mywishes.org.au.
If you are interested, you complete the forms from this site.
The forms would be completed while you are capable of rational decisions and they give you the option of asking the medical staff at a hospital to refrain from giving you intensive care that would leave you as a vegetable in a nursing home.
The effect is that you would be given any necessary pain relief, but not intensive care.
This program was recommended by a senior doctor and I trust that it will relieve the pressure on the staff to keep you alive at all costs.
Good luck with this program.

I hope you lot know, that to enter a nursing home and you own your own
house the government takes that away from you. So bugger your family
you cop the bill for care.

I know that it is a well known fact, that doctors will sometimes put
chronically and irretrievable patients kindly out of their misery.
Just a little bit more morphine for 'pain'.

Just be careful what you wish for though. There was this Austrian guy
who put to sleep disabled people with no compunction at all. Then started on other degenerates. Even that great old Winston Churchill once said, he felt all mentally defective people should be sterilized. So they didn't pass on their defective genes to the next generation.

Nursing homes are the last resort if there are no relatives left to
care for them. Or willing to care for them. A undignified way to
end ones days. If there is absolutely no chance of recovery then
why not? But recall that people in comas can miraculously recover
after years in a comatose state when doctors didn't want to pull the plug.

Some sense here, there should be an 'out' option. Provided it is made when still conscious of the decision. And not forced on one by zealous rellies who want your estate before all pleasure in life is
gone.

Bushy, my mother is now in a nursing hpme, a very good one, since I can no longer handle her care.

She told centrelink that she lived in her own self contained granny flat, which she did, except it is an extension of my home. As a "home owner" she is deemed to have assets above the threshold to require an accommodation charge, as well as fees.

They are paid $541.10 per fortnight fees, from her pension, & I pay the $350.70 accommodation charge the government pick up, if the person has no assets.

I am assured we will get this problem sorted out soon, which I don't expect to be any quicker than sorting out the Queensland health pay fiasco. It may be a while.

Even if it were hers, we could hardly sell part of the house to recoup the money, & even if I wanted to, I could rent out the granny flat, as it is not registered for rental. From what I see of councils, it would probably cost more in fees to get it registered than it would be worth anyway.

I do believe that the elderly should use some of their assets for their support. It is not a function of the tax payer to preserve pensioners assets, so they can be passed to their childrem, but it would be nice if our public servants could get something right, just now & then.

I am disapointed in myself for doing it, but I can't help hoping that these public servants get treated with the same inefficiency, we are recieving, in their old age.

Hasbeen, I am sorry to hear this. Similar situations happen in UK, even worse. However, a friends mother, transferred all her home to her daughters years before she went into a nursing home.

However, if you don't have assets you only surrender 2/3 of your pension in Australia.

With home care etc., it does cost of course. My mother was 90 1/2 when she died. I was receiving a carer pension for her before this, but non live in. She contracted Acute Myoblastic leukaemia, and was given 2 weeks to live. I moved in to give care. I got help from the community nurses for the last four weeks, twice a week. Mind you she was a difficult lady, very inflexible. However, she died in my arms after 4 1/2 months, I don't regret it one bit. She refused transfusions etc., it was very distressing for me though. But better at home than in a nursing home. She was lucid to the end though, although she did argue with me about a desert spoon being a soup spoon. And the doctor told me they would help her on her way, if she was in too much pain, which she wasn't. But if I hadn't been there, what would she have done?

Hasbeen: If she were to return to her granny flat, that $300 you pay would pay for home help and nursing in her own place? Have you thought
of that. If she has only a short time to live it might be worth thinking about. You could also claim a Carer's Pension, it is not means
tested. It's $700 per fortnight, plus you get lump sums once a year.