Educating about ageing: the next big frontier?

Australia’s ageing population brings about challenges and limitations but also potential opportunities. Lecturer in Gerontology Robin Harvey says we need leadership from those with expertise in ageing and aged care on a much broader level.

How will Australia meet the challenges of an ageing population? Will the costs of funding health and aged care for an ageing population be unsustainable?

In the light of the Intergenerational Report 2015 the challenges are enormous and potentially unsustainable (without, as it appears from the political agenda, significant cuts to services for those older people who are most vulnerable). The reality is that there are both challenges and opportunities inherent in our enviably increased longevity.

In order to position ourselves to both make and take up such opportunities however, I contend that we need leadership from those with expertise in ageing and aged care, from clinicians and care workers, to managers, service providers, older peoples’ representative groups and from policy makers and governments.

We cannot afford to think narrowly along familiar lines about ageing, we cannot afford to let ageist myths of this stage of life as an inevitable constant trajectory of decline limit our understandings of what is possible. We cannot allow policy to be driven by those assumptions about ageing underpinning the quaint old fashioned notion of the dependency ratio, whereby those over the age of 65 are considered unproductive, frail and dependent. The different trajectories of active ‘young old’ people and those in later or frailer cohorts require more sophisticated and nuanced policy contexts and responses.

As a community we need to be able to work collaboratively to generate and examine a wide range of options that will lead to opportunities for greater economic and social/ cultural participation of older people, improved social policy, service models, quality of care, health services, sustainability of service provision and greater understanding of the complex and diverse processes of ageing.

Such a challenge requires a health and policy workforce with specialist knowledge of ageing and aged care; however, knowledge changes rapidly and over time. It is therefore vital for our workforce to be able to apply new research findings, undertake critical analysis of policy and have the capacity to reflect on their own professional and current service practices towards the goal of improved quality, equity and sustainability of services.

Educating a broad and diverse workforce about ageing becomes of critical importance to the project of realising the opportunities of an ageing population. In the current policy context, education about ageing has been focused on educating aged care workers, and the aged care sector has identified leadership development within this workforce as an important direction. The educational development required for strong leadership on ageing is much broader than this however; we need to focus across the inter-related ageing, health and human services sectors at clinical and policy levels, our public servants, transport and city planners.

And yes, why not educate our economists about ageing? As Jane Halton, head of the Department of Finance, noted in presenting the David Simmons Address to the Australian Association of Ageing (AAG) Victorian division last month, ageing is an economic but also a social policy, social justice and family issue, whereas finance people and economists are too often focussed on the economic challenges. Ms. Halton pointed out the opportunities for Australia to support the ageing population with relatively small and manageable improvements in the labour force participation of women, for instance, or modest increases in the paid employment participation of older people.

It is by educating our wider workforce about ageing, not only our health and aged care workforce but also, and powerfully perhaps, including our economic policy makers, that will enable us to see past the challenges and limitations and bring about the potential opportunities of our ageing population.