This week I listened to a podcast on why buildings are getting uglier. An interesting rabbit hole.

Norwegian researcher Åshild Lappegard Hauge makes an interesting point: a rundown institutional building signals to everyone who enters — residents, staff, visitors — that what happens inside it is low priority. Colin Ellard, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo, has found something similar from the outside. Monotonous building facades measurably increase stress and lower mood in people who simply walk past them. Not the people living inside. The people passing by.

I thought about the average residential aged care home. Most are not fancy builds that end up in design magazines. I thought about the corridor lighting, the vinyl floorings, the communal dining room that could be a school canteen. These choices communicate something to every person who walks through the door — and what they mostly communicate is efficiency. Not home.

As a sector, we talk about this more than we used to. Person-centred environments, homelike design, sensory considerations are in the conversation. But we often still treat this as a nice-to-have rather than a determinant of how people feel about the care they're receiving, or delivering. Ellard's research suggests the effect is measurable, and that's worth paying attention to.

PS: There's a webinar announcement coming to your inbox in the next few days. The topic is one I don't think we talk about enough in this sector, and I'm really looking forward to sharing it.

A few days ago I was catching up with a friend who is a commercialisation specialist in the food industry. Among other things, we ended up talking about food in aged care, what gets served, how menus are built, and how hard it is to cater well for a resident population that spans dozens of cultural backgrounds.

Reading more on it, I discovered this piece in The Conversation by a researcher studying food experiences of older immigrants in US healthcare facilities. A family caregiver described how her father-in-law hadn't eaten all day in his nursing home. He wanted roti and curry for lunch and dinner. They gave him a sandwich.

Another participant's mother was served kielbasa (a Polish smoked sausage) and sauerkraut in her assisted living facility and had no idea what she was looking at.

The providers in these situations aren't neglecting anyone. Most residential kitchens are feeding dozens of residents from different backgrounds, working within tight budgets, managing dietary requirements, allergens, and procurement logistics. The operational challenge is real, and anyone who's run a kitchen at scale knows how hard it is to build a menu that satisfies everyone.

But food is more than nutrition. For someone who has migrated from another country, food is often one of the last cultural connections that remains intact when everything else, language, community, independence, has been compressed. A familiar meal is an anchor.

Some providers are already working on this. Consulting residents and families on meal preferences during intake. Partnering with local food businesses that specialise in specific cuisines. There's real momentum here, and I expect we'll see more of it as the sector matures under the new Act. The providers who get this right will notice it in resident satisfaction, family trust, and staff morale — which is reason enough.

21–22 April | Marvel Stadium, Melbourne & online

Over two days, the sessions cover what the first phase of the Support at Home rollout has taught us — what's working, what needs to change, and where the gaps in funding, guidance, systems, workforce, and accountability are showing up.

For senior staff, it's a chance to step above the day-to-day noise and discuss strategic priorities: what to fund, what to stop, and how to lead teams through the next phase. For operational managers and frontline leaders, it's about practical planning, processes that work, clearer decisions, tested ideas already delivering results in services.

I'll be part of a panel on technology and systems, one of the five conference themes, alongside workforce, financial sustainability, and compliance.

23 April | 12–1pm AEST | Online | Free | Hosted by Anglicare Sydney

I'm presenting this session aimed at both individuals figuring out how AI fits into their own work and organisations working through how to adopt it responsibly. I'll cover where AI is now, where it's heading, and how to take practical next steps, with an honest conversation about what works, what doesn't, and how to move forward with confidence. There'll be time for questions.

6–7 May | Royal International Convention Centre, Brisbane

I'll be part of the closing session — a fishbowl-style panel called "Aged Care 2076: Wild Predictions and Bold Ideas" with Sanka Amadoru (Geriatrician, Aria Health) and Dan Aitchison (CEO, Palm Lake Care). We're throwing out the rulebook and jumping 50 years into the future to imagine what aged care in Australia could look like in 2076. Expect provocation, energy, and a few ideas that will either inspire you or make you nervous.

Oxford researchers built an AI tool that reads routine cardiac CT scans and predicts heart failure within five years by detecting invisible textural changes in fat around the heart. Trained on over 70,000 patients across nine NHS Trusts, it predicted risk with 86% accuracy. Those flagged highest-risk were 20 times more likely to develop the condition. The team is now seeking regulatory approval and adapting the tool for any chest CT scan, not just cardiac ones.

An MIT paper published in February modelled how sycophantic chatbots can gradually reinforce false beliefs — even in perfectly rational users. The research is worth reading. The coverage around it, less so. As tends to happen with AI risk stories, the write-ups leaned hard into fear: chatbots are making people delusional, nobody is safe, the machines are manipulating you. Obviously, it sells, as it generates more clicks.

Sycophancy in AI models is a genuine design flaw. Models trained on human feedback learn to prioritise agreement over accuracy, and in extended conversations the effect compounds. That's worth fixing. But treating every edge case as evidence of an existential threat gives people permission to disengage from AI entirely. For a sector that needs these tools, this is the worse outcome.

A UNSW study followed more than 1,000 older adults without dementia for over 12 years and found that those with stronger cognitive abilities consistently reported higher life satisfaction, more positive mood, and better health-related quality of life — even after controlling for age, sex, physical health, depression, anxiety, and personality.

There is an interesting detail buried in the findings: being female, older, or living in residential care was associated with poorer health-related quality of life, but not lower life satisfaction or positive mood. This suggests that how people rate their health and how they rate their happiness are separate things, and that the measures we use to assess quality of life in aged care may not be capturing what actually matters to the people living it.

Every time you ask AI to create something from a blank canvas — a slide deck, a report, a letter — it has to figure out everything at once. The design, the structure, the tone, the layout, the content. Most of its effort (as well as your usage limits) goes into decisions you've already made or don't care about. The result is inconsistent, generic, and usually needs heavy editing.

The fix is simple: give it a template. Upload a previous deck. Attach a formatted report from last quarter. Paste in a document that looks the way you want the output to look. When AI has an example to work from, it stops guessing at the frame and puts its effort into the substance — the narrative, the argument, the content you actually need.

This applies to everything. Policy documents, board papers, marketing materials, project plans. If your organisation has a format, give it to the model. If you've done a version of this task before, attach it. The output will be closer to what you want on the first attempt, and you'll spend less time cleaning up formatting and more time on the work itself.

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