About Age Concern

On establishing Age Concern, Prue utilised her knowledge and skills as expanded and consolidated in the first Victorian psychogeriatric assessment team, the director of which was a progressive old age psychiatrist from the Netherlands. Thus, the initial core business was an assessment and advisory service for patients with dementia and their families.

Very quickly Age Concern became involved with providing professional development programs for nurses working in residential care. Initially the company was contracted by facilities for face to face in-service programs, but we also commenced offering seminars. As an early adopter of the virtual classroom, decades before Covid-19, many more nurses and other workers then had easy access to professional development opportunities that were cost effective. This was particularly so for rural and remote aged care staff.

In 1990 Age Concern, contracted Professor Geri Hall to visit Australia and through a series of seminars in all states, introduced Australian nurses to the first internationally published person centred model of dementia care, the Progressively Lowered Stress Threshold.

This model underpinned the successful development of the first stand-alone Dementia program for registered nurses accepted at Latrobe University as a Post Graduate elective for successful applicants in 1996. It was later accepted as an elective to Master level, University of Queensland, to support nurses wishing to complete the Nurse Practitioner program, with dementia syndromes as their specialty.

In 2017 Prue, through Age Concern, initiated the successful research project Harmony in the Bush, which attracted Commonwealth funding. With the updated Progressively Lowered Stress Threshold model as the underpinning framework, the goal was to minimise the behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia using non-pharmacological interventions. This was achieved. As Chief Investigator/Researcher (clinical) on the team, Prue was responsible for developing, introducing and supervising all clinical interventions as well as the music interventions used for behaviours and rest. She was also responsible for staff training regarding their roles introducing the strategies of the project, at each of the five research facilities.

In 2022 Age Concern chose to withdraw its licence as a Registered Training Organisation (Certificate III in Aged and Community Care/ Certificate IV in Leadership and Management).

We have maintained our status as an Educational Institution (2005).

Because of our reputation, over the years, we have been able to attract nationally and internationally recognised speakers and specialists such as Margo McCaffery (Pain management WHO), Emeritus Professor David Ames AO, Emeritus Professor Rhonda Nay and Dr Geri Richards Hall.

We continue in the belief that nurses, other health care professionals and workers, through access to high quality education and training, make an invaluable contribution towards enhancing the quality of care delivered to older Australians, irrespective of where the care is delivered.