Professor Helen Bartlett was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor and President (Gippsland Campus) at Monash University in August 2008.  She has a doctorate and an MSc in Public Policy from the University of Bath in the UK and a BA Nursing from Northumbria University.  Helen has held research and teaching  appointments at Universities in UK, Australia and Hong Kong, including the  establishment of three research centres.  She has held senior management positions in the health and social sciences and is currently leading the national emerging researchers in ageing initiative as part of her role in the ARC/NHMRC Research Network in Ageing Well.  Her previous appointment was inaugural director of the Australasian Centre in Ageing at the University of Queensland. Her research currently focuses on healthy ageing and the policy implications of population ageing. 

Fiona Ross BSc, PhD, RGN, DN  is Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Care Sciences, a joint venture between Kingston University and St George’s, University of London. In her previous role, Fiona was Professor of Gerontological Nursing in Primary Care and Director of the Nursing Research Unit (NRU) in the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College London.

Recent and current research include evaluating change in practice through evidence-based approaches e.g. South Thames Evidence-based Practice Project (STEP); multidisciplinary assessment of older people linked to outcomes; service user involvement in research and shifting professional boundaries and collaborative practice.   Fiona has recently completed research funded by NIHR SDO that used a case study approach to explore the professional experience of governance and incentives in primary care.  She is co-editor of a respected text book in its fourth edition, Nursing Older People, and is Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interprofessional Care.

Capacity building in ageing research: key successes and future challenges for Australia

Helen Bartlett

Following on from the International Year of Older Persons in 1999, there has been a surge of policy interest in promoting an ageing research agenda in Australia and internationally. This heightened interest resulted in the launch of the National Strategy for An Ageing Australia in 2002, and a number of successful initiatives to support research capacity building emerged and ranged across a much broader agenda than previously.  Government, philanthropic, service and older people’s organisations, along with national funding bodies and universities, invested energetically in forging new research directions to better understand and respond to the implications of population ageing. However, a decade later, it is not clear whether any sustainable activity has resulted and ageing as a policy focus appears to have once again taken a back seat in Australia as a broader social inclusion agenda dominates the focus of the Labour Government elected in 2008.  This shift parallels a broader international decline in interest in ageing-related research. This presentation will examine the leading elements of capacity-building in ageing research in Australia, identifying the key influencers and the notable successes.  An analysis of the intersection between policy, research and practice is crucial to understanding how progress has been shaped or hindered. The outcome of a decade of activity is considered, including the impact on the status of gerontology, the development of transdisciplinary approaches, national and international collaboration and emerging researchers' experiences and pathways.

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Time Matters: Negotiating Everyday Life for Elderly Clients and the Work Day for their Home Support Workers

Anne Martin-Matthews

The Conference theme of ‘Identities, Care and Everyday Life’ implies a sense of location, of time, and the activities that typically occur in that space and time.  The notion of ‘everyday’ time suggests particular patterns of order, regularity, rhythm, pacing, tempo, and prioritization of time use. For those elderly persons who require assistance with personal care, however, the rhythm, tempo and pacing of daily life are experienced and controlled by forces typically beyond their control.  This presentation examines the meaning, use and negotiation of time when paid carers (often representing the public sphere of service provision) enter the homes and lives of elderly persons receiving domiciliary care. Observations are based on the analysis of data from an in-depth multi-method study of 180 home support workers, 83 elderly clients, and 56 family carers of elderly home care clients in Canada.

      Our analysis is guided by a conceptual model that examines the delivery and receipt of home support across four domains: organizational, temporal, spatial and social.  This presentation focuses on the temporal domain, and examines client, worker and family carer perspectives on the compression of time in home care, with its implications for tempo and pacing of care; issues of worker  adherence to, and client experience of, ‘clock time’ in service delivery; and issues of duration, interval, and prioritization of time.  The competing perspectives of agencies, workers, clients and family members frame the relationship between these notions of time and the understanding of efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of domiciliary care.  

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Learning from Older People

Fiona Ross

This paper draws from my research on service user involvement and older people and begins with discussing the contested nature of the terms service user and involvement. It is suggested that by involving service users and older people in research that knowledge creation becomes a personal and social process, which enables us to better learn from and understand the worlds of others. The paper will be illustrated from a review of the evidence of service user involvement in nursing research, a study of the patient experience of falls, and recent findings from a NIHRSDO study on the professional experience of managing people with complex conditions that included a critical component of service user involvement. There will be a discussion of a range of issues including the meaning of representation and how it influences our thinking about relationships, strategies to develop and sustain the relationship between researchers and older people before, during and after the conclusion of a research project, managing the boundaries between priorities and time-lines of commissioners, principal investigators and the research team with the concerns and expectations of older people. Finally there will be a discussion of the impact from the perspectives of older people themselves and in terms of enriching the understanding and learning of researchers, the quality of the research and the credibility of the outcomes.

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The Embodiment of Age

Julia Twigg

Until recently social gerontology has fought shy of the topic of the body. Part of its mission has been to rescue the subject from its entrapment in the bio-medical account, with its reductive focus on the physiological and the inexorable processes of senescence.  Social gerontology instead has been concerned to emphasise the ways in which old age is shaped, defined and structured by social, and not biological, forces, including those of the state and the formal processes of welfare. But the reluctance to engage with the body and embodiment has, until recently, led it to miss some of the most interesting and central topics of old age.  Under the wider impact of the cultural turn, however, these aspects of life are assuming new prominence. Identity, consumption, sport, fashion, personhood, emotion, sexuality, time, space: all have bodily attributes.  The growing interest in the visual realm and its role in the constitution of age is also part of these developments. In the session I will look at the ways a focus on embodiment opens up new topics for gerontology; ones that increase the breadth and depth of our understanding of later years.

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