Last week my doctor asked if he could switch on an AI scribe for my appointment. I said yes, and we carried on talking while it wrote up the notes. It was the second time I've sat through this (the first was in Greece, last year).

Both times I could see the notes being built on the screen, picking up detail I'd have assumed was lost the moment the conversation moved on. As a patient, I was impressed.

This week I'm in Melbourne for the Allied Health in Aged Care Forum, a full day with CHSP and Support at Home allied health teams, where I'm speaking on AI. Scribes like that one keep coming up, and the worry people raise is whether leaning on them costs the professionals the skill of doing it themselves.

A Yale study put that to medical students who wrote their own notes, then revised them against an AI version. The notes held up, and the students who'd scored lowest improved. The wider picture is reassuring too. In a study of 263 clinicians across six health systems, burnout in outpatient clinics fell from 51.9% to 38.8% over a month with a scribe, with less documentation after hours.

The catch is in the order. In that room my doctor was still the one asking, listening and deciding, and the scribe only took it down. The students who came out ahead worked the same way round, their own thinking first, the draft second.

When I arrived in Australia almost 15 years ago, the thing I couldn't get over was that you could have lunch at a pub and walk a few steps into a room full of poker machines. Cheap meals, seats more comfortable than the bistro area, the machines (and free snacks and coffee) right there.

Last week, Wesley Mission's analysis of the latest NSW figures has the state losing $2.37 billion on poker machines in the first three months (!) of this year, up 9.4% on the same quarter last year. NSW already lost a record $9.3 billion on the pokies in 2025.

Older Australians sit inside those numbers more heavily than their share of the population. Around 23% play the pokies against roughly 16% of the general adult population, and the research points to loneliness and ease of access more than the thrill. Venues know this. The seniors' lunch special, the entertainment pitched at an older crowd, much of it is built around “seniors”. Those same customers are often on a fixed income and more likely to be drawing down savings.

I'll say openly that I don't mind a punt. I find it fun on occasion, and I've no interest in telling anyone how to spend a Sunday. What sits wrong is that we’re ok with building daytime environments around the people most drawn to it for company and least able to absorb the loss.

Some have tried to fix it. NSW set up an independent panel, ran a cashless gaming trial, and received a 530-page roadmap with 30 recommendations in late 2024. More than 500 days later, there's still been no formal government response, and the state government has signalled a full rollout across pubs and clubs is unlikely.

I won't pretend the politics are simple, that would be silly. But when the evidence is in, the panel has reported, and the losses climb every quarter, not doing something about it is way past unacceptable.

Monday 15 June | 2pm AEST | Online | Free

I'm running this webinar with Ageing Australia. The session covers where AI sits in the sector right now, the Three Tiers of AI in Aged Care framework, and where Tier 1 (the generic tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot — already in use across the sector) is creating risk and opportunity. For executives, operational managers, governance professionals and anyone responsible for technology decisions in their organisation.

Hosted by Ageing Australia

Tuesday 16 June | 9.30am–12pm AEST | Online | Free for CHSP and Support at Home providers

A hands-on workshop for desk-based aged care staff working with AI on routine tasks — drafting, summarising, problem-solving. Covers what current tools can and can't do, prompting fundamentals, privacy and accuracy considerations, and what data should never go into a public AI tool. Participants get a dedicated resource page with prompts and templates afterwards. No technical background needed.

Hosted by SSD Connect

Tuesday 16 June | 2–3.30pm AEST | Online | Free

I'm presenting a walk-through of the refreshed Guidelines for the Responsible Use of Generative AI in Aged Care. The original Guidelines have been in use for 12 months across more than 100 aged care organisations. The update reflects what providers have done with them and how the AI landscape has shifted. The session covers what's changed, why, and how to adopt or refresh the Guidelines in your own organisation, with Q&A at the end. For providers across the sector — managers, governance and compliance staff.

Hosted by AI Adoption in Aged Care workgroup

Bill Gates published a piece this week on what he calls a golden age of Alzheimer's research. He points to blood tests that can now detect the disease, the first two drugs the FDA has approved to modestly slow it, and more. He compares it to HIV: a diagnosis that was once a death sentence and is now something people live with for years. If that actually happens, it will change aged care as much as medicine.

Short documentary Born to be Mild spends fifteen minutes with men who collect milk bottles, photograph every letterbox they can find, and take roundabouts seriously. The club's motto is "dull, not boring," and the film holds to it — affectionate, never once mocking its subjects. Most of them are older, absorbed in something gloriously specific, which is its own quiet answer to what a meaningful day looks like.

Google has shown a research system that reads heart rate, and resting heart rate across a day, from the front camera in the seconds after the user unlocks their phone (so, no need for wearables). Resting heart rate is one of the better signals of long-term heart risk. It's a research system rather than a product, so this is only giving the shape of things to come, but it certainly has many applications in our sector.

Aged care has a lot of policies, procedures and reference documents, and NotebookLM can hold all of it and answer questions about it in plain language.

Setting one up takes a few minutes. Create a notebook, and load in the operating procedures, the staff handbook, the key policies, and the contact lists for each function — who covers what, and how to reach them. NotebookLM only uses the documents it's given, and every answer cites the source it came from, so it can be checked.

After that, "what's our process for X" or "who do I contact about Y" is one question away, answered from the organisation's own documents rather than someone's memory of them.

The usual caution applies. Check anything that matters before relying on it, and keep resident or personal information out of a public tool unless the organisation has cleared it.

Each week, I review developments in ageing and aged care and what they mean in practice. If this was useful, forward it to someone in the sector who'd appreciate it.

George Gouzounis