We can prevent avoidable decline

The aged care royal commission set forth a range of new measures and standards translating to real improvements in the safety and care of older Australians. Unfortunately, it missed an opportunity. To change mindsets.

Older people are people. They deserve to have the same access to support to improve their health as anyone at any other age. However, right now, in Australia, that is the exception – not the norm.

We need governments to understand the significant and far-reaching value of re-enablement right up until the edge of life. Until you are supporting people towards a good death.

The World Health Organisation explains that in pursuit of healthy ageing, there must be a whole of system and service approach focusing on the needs and rights of older people. It articulates that by basing care around functional ability, it improves wellbeing and ensures timely access to exercise.

It’s no revelation – a person’s decline often starts when they are unable to engage in everyday activities for whatever reason.

All the research shows when you have low or no mobility, you are more likely to experience weight loss, wounds will take longer to heal (and are more common), health complications are compounded, and your quality of life will probably decline.

Mobility gives people dignity. What does this look like? Keeping people walking – even if it’s just to the bathroom and back, or to the dining room, on a walker. Helping ensure they can hold their cup of tea, that they can get in and out of a car themselves. Above all, when they fall, they are given every support to get back on their feet – or as close to it as possible.

Although frailty is highly prevalent in older people, the ability to push back on frailty is equally possible. 

As it stands, it takes the courage and commitment from providers and practitioners to work out ways to bring health promotion into their aged care settings and offerings.

Several organisations interstate and in South Australia, including Clayton Church Homes, have a genuine positive ageing approach and are independently investing accordingly.

However, there is no comprehensive restorative regulation or funding model to support this. The government has not yet dismantled the barriers to the structures and social systems that constrain older people to recover from setbacks. Generally, a mindset to help older people to thrive without discernment or discrimination is missing in aged care but that doesn’t have to be the case.

When we reorientate ageing towards a growth mindset, the benefits go beyond the individual resulting in reduced pressures on our overloaded health systems and relieving financial costs to taxpayers and communities.

The goal is to prevent avoidable decline and push back on disability for residents and clients, extending opportunities for recovery before they fall into disability.

Recently, there have been great strides to advance older people’s rights. However, we haven’t addressed the inequality for older people to access health promotion.

Australia can make healthy ageing normal – even for those in their latest years.

The first defeat is not – nor should ever be – the last.

Jo Boylan is chief executive officer of Clayton Church Homes. She has recently released a book with Dr Sara Pazell called Healthcare Insights: The Voice of the Consumer; the Provider and the Work Design.

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