The consequences of population ageing for Australia are increasingly debated at a national and state level. Ageing issues on the policy agenda now reflect the need to take a broader societal approach. However, the evidence to inform policy is still lacking in a number of areas. In particular, more needs to be understood about ageing from the community perspective, including evidence on values and attitudes across the generations and the expectations and needs of older age groups. This paper explores the evidence on community perspectives and attitudes on ageing and the extent to which it has informed policy and program development. Using illustrations from Queensland, key policy challenges presented by some of the broader emerging issues will be highlighted, along with possible strategies for policy development in the future.
While the social aspects of dementia have been increasingly researched over the past decade, there has been little focus on sleep and its significance to older people with dementia within the context of care. This paper attempts to address this knowledge gap by exploring the experiences of sleep among older people with dementia and the perceptions of family carers and care staff in different care settings. The paper is drawn from a larger research project that explored the empowerment of older people with dementia, and involved 18 in-depth interviews with older people with dementia and 8 focus groups with health and social care staff and family carers. The discourses of the older people with dementia and family carers, emphasised vulnerabilities associated with sleep, thematically represented as: (1) interconnections between health, care, the body and sleep; (2) memory loss and perceptions of sleep, time and place; and (3) a sense of vulnerability around night-time, sleep and safety. The sleep discourses of the older people with dementia and their family carers focused on meanings associated with experiential dimensions of sleep and were closely connected to their social identities and roles. The key concern for the health and social care staff was the organisation of sleep, including: (1) temporal management of sleep and sleep practices, and (2) management of sleep across public/private space: safety, surveillance and privacy. The sleep discourses of the health and social care staff predominately focused on sleep practices and environmental dimensions of sleep. These different perspectives denote varying positions and concerns in relation to sleep between waking conscious actors and dormant bodies, thereby highlighting the social significance of power relations and vulnerabilities within the context of care for older people with dementia.
Implications of rapid growth in the elderly population for private and public residential facilities; recommends regulating the safety and quality of care.
Effective policy responses to the ageing of the population are a priority area for government and non‐government agencies across Australia, particularly at the community level. This article focuses on the policy goal of ageing well at the local level, and more specifically, the strong principle of collaboration that underpins this goal. Too little is known about how to achieve effective collaboration in the ageing field. This article aims to address this by developing an analytical framework from the broad literature on collaborative processes, and applying this framework to data collected from interviews with stakeholders in ageing across two local communities in Queensland. While participants recognise the importance and strength of working together and provide local examples of how this has been achieved effectively, they also acknowledge the associated challenges and complexity. This all spanned the six factors of the framework: the context of ageing; the characteristics and relationships between partners; the need for adequate procedures; as well as structure and relationships aimed at building capacity; a shared sense of purpose; and access to adequate resources.
