People in residential aged care
Helping people engage with aged care
Translating and interpreting services are available to help people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds engage with aged care. These services are free for older people their families and carers, and government-funded aged care providers.
Registered aged care providers can use the aged care translation service to translate materials such as digital and print handbooks, service agreements, welcome brochures, and facility signage.
Approved aged care providers can also use Translating and Interpreting Service (TIS) National’s interpreting services to support discussions with older people about aged care.
The MINDSET Study, led by the National Ageing Research Institute and partially funded by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, aimed to improve the quality of interpreter communication during cognitive assessments for dementia, particularly for people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds. In response to identified gaps in interpreter knowledge and experience, the study co-designed and evaluated a set of specialist online training modules covering dementia knowledge, cross-cultural communication, and briefing/debriefing techniques. These modules have now been nationally implemented and made freely available on the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) website to interpreters across Australia, with over 865 interpreters completing the training to date.
Use of residential aged care
This section previously used health condition data from the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) to identify people living with dementia. In October 2022, the ACFI was replaced with the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) funding model, which does not capture health condition information. Therefore, the most recent data for this section are from 2021–22, with no further updates. The AIHW is working with the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing to determine appropriate methods to capture data on people living with dementia in aged care.
According to Aged Care Funding Instrument data, 21% of people with dementia living in permanent residential aged care homes in 2021–22 were born in a non-English speaking country (Table S13.11, see Residential aged care for more detail on this data). This is lower than the proportion of all people aged 30 and over who reported they had dementia and were born in a non-English speaking country in the 2021 Census (25%).
The smaller proportion of people from (Culturally and linguistically diverse) CALD backgrounds in permanent residential aged care may reflect differences in how aged care services are used by people from CALD backgrounds. Use of residential aged care is likely to be affected by cultural attitudes to formal aged care services and family obligations or cultural norms for providing care, as well as variation in the availability of culture-specific residential aged care services. For some cultures, the responsibility of caring for the elderly population falls upon kin, and choosing residential care over a family member’s home may be taboo (Rees and McCallum 2018).
For people of CALD backgrounds, it can sometimes also be difficult to access and utilise services, if services are not designed with CALD communities in mind and if there are language barriers between service providers and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. Considerations when designing a service accessible to members of the CALD community may include providing information in a number of languages and ensuring the availability of interpreters, food choices, access and respect of cultural practices and family, and general independence (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission 2020).
ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) (2022) Long term health conditions, ABS, Australian Government, accessed 30 October 2025.
Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (2020) Working with aged care consumers – Resource, accessed 28 August 2020.
Rees K and McCallum J (2018) Dealing with Diversity: Aged care services for new and emerging communities, National Seniors Australia website, accessed 4 July 2023.