Focused, excited and confident about making an impact is how Renu Borst – chief executive officer of the Australian Association of Gerontology – describes her feelings during a break at the professional body’s recent national gathering.
“I’m looking at making connections at this conference so that we can have more collaboration, more focused conversations, and projects that come out of it,” Borst tells Australian Ageing Agenda.
Borst is also feeling buoyed by the “so many people” in attendance. More than 550 individuals turned out for the November event on the Gold Coast. “It is a beautiful community,” she says. “I have a lot of gratitude because this is an opportunity for members and non-members to see what AAG can do.”
Key among what it can do, says Borst, is connecting the dots within the broad community of individuals, organisations and policymakers in the ageing space. It’s Borst’s second AAG conference since taking over the helm of the multidisciplinary membership organisation for the nation’s experts on ageing in August 2022.
The role includes CEO of AAG in its capacity as Corporate Trustee of the AAG Research Trust, and executive officer of both the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics Asia/Oceania Region and International Longevity Centre Australia. As a native of Fiji and former resident of New Zealand, Borst brings her knowledge and lived experience of the region to the roles.
We are basically like a big Yellow Pages
Moving to New Zealand after graduating from the University of the South Pacific – she studied public administration and sociology – Borst started out as a healthcare assistant for a private company managing retirement homes and hospitals. Her 20 years of leadership experience in the health sector includes almost nine as CEO of the New Zealand Society of Anaesthetists and – on this side of the ditch – interim general manager at LiverWELL, which incorporates Hepatitis Victoria.
Among her current priorities, says Borst, is to bring the plethora of stakeholders together to realise the AAG’s overarching aim of improving the experience of ageing through the linking of research, policy and practice.
“My biggest plan is connecting all these communities so that the information flow is a little bit more seamless and [there’s more] understanding of who is out there,” says Borst. “I see AAG as a platform and everyone can plug into to it. It’s how we can provide value to you,” she says.
“We can have consumers. We can have providers. Everyone can be a member. We can show value in how we advocate for different groups, how we can channel that information through our community and how we can find the right people and right fit for projects [and] different grants.”
Recent backend upgrades mean the association is better set up than ever to facilitate the connections and collaborations.
“We’ve invested a lot into our IT platform,” says Borst. “We can build big communities and mini communities. We can create a safe space for everyone to be having a conversation.”
AAG launched its new digital platform in the first half of 2023. It includes an online hub where members can host and participate in discussions, browse the content library and search a directory of others in the community.
The hub also supports private communities – such as special interest groups, committees and divisions – to connect and collaborate.
A network of experts
While the AAG counts many academic researchers among its member base, the actual requirement for membership is an applied interest in ageing. That goes for individuals and organisations – and the reason why many members are practitioners rather than academics.
Along the same vein, the AAG does not conduct new research but rather taps into its community of experts – the evidence base – and distils the research into more accessible and immediately useful bites as part of its work to inform and influence policy and practice.
Access to the evidence base in plain understandable language is among the key reasons to collaborate with AAG, says Borst. She encourages the aged care sector’s service providers, individuals and projects to seek out partnership opportunities. Partnering might be as simple as sharing a call for research participants or more involved such as seeking an evidence review for a specific project a service has funding for.
“We can give evidence-based information to aged care on nutrition, physical activities like music therapy and anything like that because we have the leaders of ageing in our community. We can connect them. We are basically like a big Yellow Pages,” says Borst.
For those developing services or other initiatives, such as support for sector professionals or consumers, AAG’s hub can link it to stakeholders.
“We have a platform to connect you to people that need your services. And this is how are we going to trickle down all the great work that is happening to the people on the ground,” Borst adds.
Priorities for 2024
Like many organisations in the sector, Borst says the AAG’s biggest priority is “to ensure we are financially sustainable”. But it’s not the only one.
The organisation also has its sights on being invited to the table as a valued participant on key societal issues – such as the aged care reforms, intergenerational report aims, and healthy ageing strategy.
“I would like to achieve something useful in meaningful projects that have an impact for government, where we can support some of the work that they are doing with real solutions that are seen and felt by people [and] that show there’s progress being made in this space,” says Borst.
We want to find solutions for problems
“We are also asking to be partners on brands so we can do some dissemination work, [and] policy work. We want to keep that engagement going with people so if someone has a grant and they have some great work out of it, we can help them disseminate because we have the community at our fingertips.”
These kinds of initiatives provide a double benefit, says Borst. One to help the AAG financially and another to help bridge the 17-year gap between research and practice. The latter is among the many challenges discussed at AAG’s 2023 conference, notes Borst. “That is a huge time, right? We don’t have that sort of timeframe.”
She says research needs to be more agile and the time to get it to practice and disseminated to translation must be reduced. One way AAG helps to speed things up is through its grant-giving arm, the AAG Research Trust.
“The trust is uniquely placed within AAG to enable important work that often falls outside the criteria of other large funding programs,” says Borst. The trust provides seed funding for projects and capacity building in early to mid-career researchers and practitioners.
“Depending on the grant, the funding might enable a member to conduct a study or project, attend a conference, publish an open access article or develop a brochure … the overall aim is to improve the experience of ageing.”
On a grander scale, Borst says the AAG wants to help ensure resources are utilised effectively and impacts are maximised with whoever they are working with – which might be the Australian community, the Pacific community or New Zealand – as society tries to solve the international challenges coming from ageing populations and economic pressures.
“Anytime there is someone else doing a small piece of work in this space, we want them to come and join us. We want to be able to support them. We want us to work together for the common good because that is the objective here.”
Conversations at the conference alone – including with representatives from Department of Health and Aged Care and different CEOs – have been positive in this area, she says.
“I have made so many connections and people want to work together. They have accepted us with open arms,” says Borst. She stresses that AAG wants to be a partner – not a competitor – of other organisations; working together in pursuit of having the “conversations” and “getting the results”.
“We want to collaborate, and this is genuine collaboration. We want to find solutions for problems. And that’s the impact that we want to measure.”
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