How to embed reablement, wellbeing and more

We asked four Positive Ageing Summit speakers:

How can aged care providers embed positive ageing practices in their services?

Focus on ‘support for thriving’ over ‘care for decline’

By Anita Hobson-Powell

Positive ageing is more than just living longer; it is about living optimally. Everyone, regardless of age or health status, has the right to experience a life filled with dignity, purpose, and wellbeing. Individuals receiving aged care services are also entitled to this right.

Aged care providers play a critical role in ensuring their clients not only receive the support they need but are empowered to continue living a meaningful and socially connected life.

Positive ageing is also a holistic consideration of one’s physical, mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. This includes helping individuals stay active, engaged, and independent.

Allied health professionals play a vital role in making positive ageing possible. This includes services like physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech pathology, psychology, dietetics, and podiatry. They are not optional extras to aged care services; they are essential services that should be available to all older people.

Allied health services play a crucial role in supporting mobility, preventing falls and improving nutrition. They also assist with managing chronic diseases, enhancing communication and cognitive function, and promoting mental health and emotional wellbeing.

Aged care providers should focus on “support for thriving” rather than “care for decline”. This means involving older people in care decisions, acknowledging their goals and preferences, and creating environments that promote autonomy, connection and enjoyment.

Allied health is not a nice to have, but a core service that can significantly reduce hospital admissions, support early intervention, delay or prevent physical and cognitive decline, and enable people to remain active and engaged in their community.

All aged care providers, both residential and home care services, must assess and respond to the allied health needs of all their clients. This includes developing individualised care plans and involving allied health professionals early and as required to ensure clients have access to the services they need to age positively and maintain their independence.

Anita Hobson-Powell is Australia’s chief allied health officer

Foster a culture that values seniors as individuals

By Dr Chris Bollen

Positive ageing is more than just a philosophy – it’s a proactive approach to supporting older individuals in leading healthy, engaged and meaningful lives. For community aged care providers, embedding positive ageing practices means reshaping mindsets and services to focus on capability, not just care.

As a general practitioner who shares many older patients with community aged care providers, I am perplexed at the lack of focus many providers place on improving an older person’s intrinsic capacity whilst living at home.

The evidence is clear that the trajectory of both physical and cognitive decline can be significantly changed with improving muscle health with two to three weekly resistance exercise sessions, increased dietary protein (1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight daily) and a focus on the older person’s goals, plus increasing social interactions.

These areas are all in the remit of the aged care provider, whilst clearly my role as a GP is to reinforce these messages as well as assessing causes for fatigue plus optimising medications and vaccinations.

I am regularly writing to package coordinators to remind them the older person we both support is living with frailty, and something can be done to improve their experience of ageing more than just having a cleaner or a weekly shower.

It could be as simple as the visiting care team member leading a regular short sit-to-stand chair exercise session to build the muscles of independence.

I have found success through using Home Care Package medication charts to prescribe exercise for those people having supervised medication visits once or twice daily. Starting with five sit-to-stands once or twice daily and increasing over 10 weeks to 15 sit-to-stands once or twice daily does yield results.

All providers involved in the care of older people do need to reinforce the message, “it’s never too late to build muscle”. However, action is required to make it happen.

At its core, positive ageing centres around respect, autonomy, and inclusion. Aged care providers can start by fostering a culture that values older people as individuals with rich experiences and ongoing potential.

This involves training staff to adopt strengths-based approaches, where conversations and care plans focus on what an older person can do and wants to do, rather than limitations or deficits.

Dr Chris Bollen is a general practitioner and primary healthcare consultant at Bollen Health

Pursuing a paradigm shift for aged care

By Jo Boylan

The introduction of the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards from July 2025 is the unprecedented impetus we desperately needed. The standards require us, as providers, to shift our thinking about ageing and aged care to not just consider reablement – but implement it.

How do we make healthy ageing normal when we’ve normalised health decline in older people for so long?

There’s no silver bullet. It’s about tackling systemic ageism while redesigning and setting up the structures, policies, procedures and settings to strengthen opportunities for every older person to recover from setbacks and push back against disability. 

As a first step, providers need to set up a model of care that is health promoting and incorporates healthy ageing actions into everyday living. Providers should understand what is holding them back from ensuring every older person receiving aged care services can access resources to improve their health outcomes up until they die.   

Asking what healthy ageing looks like is a sound start. Talking with hundreds of older people over the years, the answer to this question is almost always the same – being able to actively interact and connect with their family and community. Eating, talking, walking and going on outings with them. Being able to feed themselves and go to the toilet with some assistance is fundamental to their dignity as well as staying on their feet as long as they possibly can.

It is important for providers to implement healthy ageing holistically as an organisation not as an isolated program carried out by one part of the business. Developing policies, procedures, structures and roles to help their model come alive is paramount. Parameters, including timeframes, also need to be set around the recovery pathway, to ensure progression.

Also, it’s critical to consider whether the aged care setting creates illbeing or wellbeing. This includes the look, feel and logistics of the physical environment as well as the culture. Structured exercise and social engagement must be prioritised and supported with the appropriate resources and equipment.

Staff deserve to be educated and empowered to identify, advocate and rise up to the challenge and push back against dependency. They will have the knowledge and agency to recognise decline early and harness their connection with older people and take proactive steps to address it.

Expectations are rising. As providers, we will all be asked: Did you provide that person access to interventions that would improve their health and wellbeing? The measurement of the new standards will push us and that’s only positive.

Jo Boylan is chief executive officer of Clayton Church Homes

A collaborative approach is paramount

By Christina Wyatt

The Australian aged care landscape is undergoing a significant shift, with a clear emphasis on restorative approaches. This is evidenced by the renewed Restorative Care Pathway in the Support at Home program and its prominent inclusion in the latest Support at Home program manual. This change signals a commitment to empowering older adults.

Restorative care, at its core, is about enabling individuals to actively participate in meaningful life activities and roles. This might involve rehabilitation to regain lost function or providing adaptive strategies and education to overcome limitations.

The fundamental shift is from a “doing for” to a “doing with” philosophy, underpinned by a strengths-based approach – a cornerstone of allied health practice, particularly for occupational therapists.

Occupational therapists are uniquely positioned to drive positive ageing through restorative care. Their expertise lies in analysing functional performance, identifying barriers to participation, and developing tailored interventions that maximise independence and wellbeing. They bring a holistic perspective, considering the individual’s physical, cognitive, and environmental factors to facilitate engagement in daily life.

A core aim of occupational therapy in this context is to support individuals in maintaining their functional abilities for as long as possible, emphasising the critical role of sustaining daily activities, roles, and routines. The adage “use it or lose it” is particularly relevant here.

Participation in familiar activities, regardless of how seemingly small – such as making a drink, collecting mail, or caring for a pet – is vital for preserving physical movement, cognitive engagement, and a sense of purpose, all of which are integral to positive ageing and function. 

A truly effective approach to positive ageing necessitates a combination of services that both analyse and sustain older adults’ activities as they age, through the expertise offered by occupational therapists, alongside services that complement their existing abilities and strengths, such as the crucial support provided by care staff.

For aged care providers to genuinely embed restorative practices and achieve this delicate but vital balance, a collaborative, multidisciplinary team approach is paramount.

By leveraging the unique skills of occupational therapists and fostering close collaboration with personal care and support staff, providers can equip their teams with the knowledge and strategies to consistently integrate restorative principles into daily interactions, ultimately promoting independence, dignity, and positive ageing outcomes for older Australians.

Christina Wyatt is a professional practice advisor of aged care at Occupational Therapy Australia

Positive Ageing Summit is an initiative of Australian Ageing Agenda and Community Care Review – read our coverage of the event here and find out more on the Positive Ageing Summit 2025 website

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