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Transcript

Narrator:

Australia and rural Victoria is facing an ageing community, demand for health services has increased dramatically and the right kind of professionals need to be trained to deliver the right mix of services. To address this challenge The John Richards Initiative research team has been hard at work at the Albury-Wodonga campus of La Trobe University.

Jeni Warburton:

The key objectives of the John Richards Initiative are really to make a difference, to provide the research evidence that will make a difference for older people living in rural communities. Particularly based in this region in the northeast of Victoria. We work with a range of stakeholders, people who work in the aged care and health sector, policy makers and so on about making a difference.

Narrator:

By 2021 one in three rural Victorians will be aged 60 years or over. How to cope with this trend is one of Professor Warburton’s chief concerns.

Jeni Warburton:

One of the major challenges of ageing in rural areas is that acute growth of older people in communities, so that’s happening as a result of two trends, one is that people are ageing in place, they are remaining in the same communities as they age where as the young are moving away which is intensifying the numbers of older people in those communities. The other trend is around older people moving to rural areas as they age, so tree change, sea change type of move where people are migrating to rural areas which puts pressure on rural communities around how they provide adequate services for such a large proportion of older people in the community.

Narrator:

Part of the centre’s purpose is not only to work in collaboration with service providers and agencies, but also to research the unique issues faced by an ageing population in a rural community.

Jeni Warburton:

We are developing a broad program of research and there is plenty of interesting issues to look at. Certainly there is a lot of innovation happening in this particular region that we would like to explore, work with service providers, work with agencies and so on to look at some of the key issues around ageing. So there is a whole range of innovation, things happening in rural areas that would be good to capture in good rigorous University research. So there is a lot of issues around workforce because one of the major challenges for being in a rural area is getting access to workforce, rural health and aged care workforce, so that’s a big program of research we are developing in partnership with a lot of other agencies and issues around people experiencing disadvantage and that mix of disadvantage and the positives of living a rural community, some of the amenities and good lifestyle issues of living in a rural community. So we are wanting to capture some of that in research, all research that’s very, very important for developing policy and practice for making a difference in the lives of older people.