Resources

Shona McQueen from Catholic Health Australia describes the work of End of Life Directions for Aged Care (ELDAC). This initiative, funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, aims to improve the aged care workforce’s capacity to provide quality palliative and advance care planning.

In explaining the meaning of ‘meaningful activities’, Judith Leeson, Director of Vector Consultants, poses this question to her readers: How would you want to spend your days in residential aged care?

Despite a plethora of information on healthy ageing through reabling approaches, there continues to be an entrenched stereotype of individual ageing as an inevitable process of decline over which we have little control. Hilary O’Connell of iLA describes LiveUp—an initiative promoting early intervention to delay the decline of a person’s capacity to live or function independently.

Professor Josephine Clayton, Director of Palliative Care Research & Learning, HammondCare, describes the Advance Project Dementia Toolkit—a free online resource for clinicians, managers, and careworkers in aged care and primary care settings for building skills in initiating conversations about advance care planning and assessing the palliative care needs of people living with dementia.

In this blog, social anthropologist, Dr Angela Zhang, reflects on the question ‘can aged care residents experience a sense of wellbeing in the presence of disease and functional decline?'

In her blog, Dr Katrina Erny-Albrecht of the Research Centre for Palliative Care, Death and Dying, Flinders University, introduces a range of new palliAGED Practice Tip Sheets for aged care workers, reflecting on the way these topics describe the very profound human experience of dying.

What makes an activity meaningful? And why are different people drawn to different activities? In this blog, Associate Professor Tim Windsor of Flinders University explores these questions using a self-determination theory perspective. At the core of this theory is the notion that human motivation and well-being are sustained through the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Professor Lee-Fay Low, Professor in Ageing and Health from the University of Sydney, describes some of the challenges of conducting aged care research in the midst of aged care reforms.

In this blog, Dr Claire Gough of ARIIA describes some of the challenges in defining rehabilitation within the context of aged care and its relationship to the concepts of reablement and restorative care.

Dr Xanthe Golenko explains how the Bolton Clarke Storytelling Program is bringing life story work into residential aged care to promote the personhood of each resident and build connections between staff and those in their care.