Age-Friendly North East Victoria

Longer, healthier lives bring great benefits. Older people are the backbone of communities: providing volunteer emergency services, transport, sport and social services; supporting and running small local businesses; providing assistance and support to families, neighbours and other community members.

Age-friendly communities play a significant role in preventing or delaying many of the health problems related to ageing and chronic disease.

The United Nations proclaimed 2020-2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing, calling for sustained global action to generate transformative change in four interconnected areas: address ageism, create age-friendly communities, deliver integrated care, and provide long-term care.

Age-friendly North East Victoria has developed a range of resources to assist local communities transform into environments where everyone can age well.

Current Resources

How Can the Lived Environment Support Healthy Ageing? A Spatial Indicators Framework for the Assessment of Age-Friendly Communities.

Davern M., Winterton R, Brasher K, & Woolcock G. (2020) How Can the Lived Environment Support Healthy Ageing? A Spatial Indicators Framework for the Assessment of Age-Friendly Communities International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

This paper provides a quantifiable spatial indicators framework to assess local lived environments according to each AFC domain. The selection of these spatial indicators can be applied within local neighbourhoods, Census tracts, suburbs, municipalities, or cities within minimal resource requirements other than applied spatial analysis addressing past critiques of the age-friendly community movement. The framework has great potential for application within both local, national, and international policy and planning contexts in the future.
Understanding your community: An age-friendly checklist

Supporting communities to become age friendly is one of the most effective strategies to create thriving places in which everyone can live, learn, work, play and age to the best of their abilities.

Creating age-friendly environments is crucial for communities to be places where older people can continue to develop personally, contribute to their communities, and age safely in a place that is right for them. Such places promote health, remove barriers to participation, and provide support to people experiencing losses in mental or physical capacity.

The Age Friendly North East Victoria Communities Checklist can assist in understanding how aspects of community life enable, or create barriers, to healthy ageing. It provides an opportunity to identify and understand what’s working well, and areas that could be improved to become more age-friendly.
Download Checklist
Keep cool this summer

Most of us look forward to the warmer weather and feeling some sun on our faces. However, exposure to even moderate heat can result in heat stress and heat-related illnesses. Importantly, heat-related illness can be prevented.

This information sheet explains what is heat stress, how to treat it, and tips to avoid it.
What is Heat Stress Keep Cool This Summer Tips to Avoid Heat Stress
Is your health service age-friendly? A guide to assess the age-friendliness of a health service

‘A guide to assess the age-friendliness of a health service’ was developed to help health service boards, clinicians, executive teams, staff, and community members assess, plan, and contribute to the establishment of an age-friendly health service.

Many older people enjoy a long, healthy life. However, many struggle with chronic ill-health. Almost half of all hospital patients are people aged sixty-five and over. While in hospital, older people, even those who are otherwise well, are at significant risk of healthcare-related harm, separate from the reason for their admission. Age-friendly environments have a substantial role in preventing or delaying many of the health problems related to ageing and chronic disease.
Download Assessment Guide
An age-friendly approach to disaster recovery

Older people bring particular strengths and vulnerabilities to their communities in disaster recovery. This report draws on national and international research and policy to describe those strengths and vulnerabilities, and proposes corresponding practical, community-level actions that can be incorporated into recovery plans and actions. These actions have potential to mitigate the negative individual health and wellbeing impacts wrought by disasters thus expediting the recovery process and deepening community resilience.
Download Booklet

Indigo 4Ms
Age-Friendly Health Care

Age-friendly health care can ensure older people live longer in better health. The Indigo 4Ms Framework consists of evidence-based guidelines in four interconnected areas—What matters, medication, mobility, and mental wellbeing—that can prevent, slow, or even reverse common age-related difficulties in hearing, seeing, moving, and remembering and reduce harm and improves outcomes in hospital-based care.

The Indigo 4Ms Framework provides integrated care for older people in rural settings consistent with the quadruple aim of primary health care: to improve population health, deliver a higher quality service to patients, lower costs, and ensure the wellbeing of the health workforce.

Development of Framework

The Indigo 4Ms Framework was developed with funding from Better Care Victoria. Older people and clinicians from across the Ovens Murray area took part in a co-design process informed by the National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) advice on the development of guidelines.

The co-design team assessed two best-practice models—the Institute of Healthcare Improvement’s 4Ms Framework and the World Health Organization’s Integrated Care for Older People guidelines—and academic findings specific to rural healthcare to build a rural health Indigo 4Ms Framework.

An economic evaluation showed substantial cost savings if age-friendly care was delivered to older Victorians.

Resources

Building an Age-Friendly Indigo Health System: Final report to Better Care Victoria

In 2018, Better Care Victoria funded the Indigo Consortium to develop an innovative, systems-based approach to the care for older people. The Indigo Consortium, in collaboration with its partner agencies, applied the National Health and Medical Research Council’s advice on the development of guidelines and co-design to develop the Indigo 4Ms Framework. This report documents that journey.
Download Report
Age-friendly care for older adults within rural Australian health systems: An integrative review

Winterton R, Hodgkin S, Clune S and Brasher K (2020) Age-friendly care for older adults within rural Australian health systems: An integrative review Australasian Journal on Ageing 40(1), 16–34.

This paper identifies the core elements of interventions and models of care that facilitate positive outcomes for older adults within rural Australian health systems and assesses the extent to which these core elements align with the core elements of IHI’s age-friendly health systems 4Ms Framework.

Current work

The Indigo 4Ms PRIMM project was funded by the Australian government through the Department of Health and Aged Care. It was a collaboration between seven rural health services and the John Richards Centre for Rural Ageing Research. Using a co-design process with over forty older people and health workers from across the region, it has produced a set of new tools that will increase rural capacity to deliver integrated, age-friendly care.

The Indigo 4Ms tool for older people will enhance the autonomy of older people. It will enable them to act with purpose to maintain or improve their capacity, creating the conditions for older people to do and be what they have reason to value.

The Indigo 4Ms tool for primary healthcare workers will be instrumental in enabling health workers to navigate the complexity of integrated care for older people by its ability to structure the clinical encounter through the 4Ms. The tool guides health workers in conversations with older people to address the commonly missed, essential areas of care.

To put both tools into practice, the Australian government has provided funding: to support the implementation of the Indigo 4Ms tool for health workers into primary health settings in six rural health services, and the State Trustees Australia Foundation will support the implementation of the Indigo 4Ms tool for older people in four rural communities. The John Richards Centre for Rural Ageing Research at La Trobe University will undertake a large-scale evaluation of primary health implementation and is leading the community-based work.

Download Report

Download Toolkit for Older People

Download Toolkit for Healthcare Workers