Last week’s write-up (Cheap lunch, then the pokies) drew more replies than usual, so two things to add. A reader and friend pointed me to Shaun Micallef's Going for Broke, a documentary series on ABC iview about how Australians became the world's biggest gambling losers and where that's heading.

And another reader did further digging in the numbers published by Wesley Mission. They found that Tweed (one of NSW's fastest-ageing communities) lost $30.3 million on poker machines in the first quarter of this year, about $336,000 a day. Finally, on Thursday this week, a councillor moves a motion for Tweed Shire Council to back Wesley Mission's Put Pokies in Their Place campaign and press the state government for harm-reduction reforms.

👋 A warm welcome to the readers who joined after the Allied Health in Aged Care Forum in Melbourne last week, and after Ageing Australia's InnovAgeing session yesterday. Glad to have you here!

That humans are social animals is an old observation, going back to Aristotle. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the French anthropologist, took it further. The self itself grows out of a lifetime of living with others — we before I. He and his theory are the subject of a very interest long form article (which you can also listen to as audio).

That changes what a loss is in a care setting. If a person is built out of the people around them, then losing those people takes away part of who they are. A partner dying, a move that cuts someone off from their street and their routines and the people who knew them — these subtract from the person, not only from their week.

Residential care providers see the shape of this constantly. A client who is visibly upset for weeks after their move to the home, or another who declines sharply after a spouse dies. It gets read, reasonably, as low mood or grief, as something time will settle.

On the relational reading, some of that decline is the self losing the people it was built from. Bringing the family in, holding the old connections open and importantly, treating the withdrawal as a clinical event could do a lot more than waiting it out.

Wednesday 5 August | 9am–5pm AEST | Establishment Ballroom, Sydney | Ticketed

A one-day forum for NDIS and aged care providers on where AI and automation are landing in day-to-day operations — rostering, compliance, intake, payroll — and where they're still rough. Hosted by Tania Gomez Consulting, the program runs across VR for dementia, AI governance, short tech showcases from a range of vendors, and a CEO roundtable to close. I'm speaking on the future of care.

You can read more here. Registering through the link below takes 20% off. 👇

TAL, one of Australia's largest life insurers, surveyed pre-retirees and retirees on how ready they are. The gap that matters for our sector is between when people expect to stop working and when they actually do. 61% of current retirees had already left the workforce before 65; only 15% of pre-retirees expect to go that early. Health, redundancy and caring duties don't wait for the plan.

The aged care read is downstream. People who leave work earlier and poorer than they planned for are the ones who later weigh up home care fees and accommodation deposits with less room than they expected.

The Independent Living Laboratory is a purpose-built simulation facility developed by the National Centre for Healthy Ageing (NCHA), a collaboration between Monash University and Bayside Health. Located at the Healthy Futures Hub in Seaford, the lab is part of a precinct designed to support thriving communities through research, innovation, and inclusive design. It was co-created with various stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers, architects, and community members, to shape future models of care and living environments for older adults and people with disabilities.

If you happen to have an apartment in New York, a German startup will clean it for free, as long as the cleaner wears a head camera and the footage goes to train household robots. The cleaning obviously is costing them money, but the recording of someone doing the work is the product, valuable enough to cover the wage. What strange and fascinating times we live in!

I recently met Seshnie Taylor, a linguist who founded Vocare in Adelaide. This is a tool that helps frontline care workers who speak English as an additional language sharpen their pronunciation. It works on the specific sounds that cause misunderstanding (final consonants, R against L, short and long vowels etc) through private, self-paced practice, with a baseline assessment and levels to progress through.

Vocare's argument is that communication is a safety variable — the misunderstandings it works on are the ones in a medication instruction, a manual-handling direction, a handover. There are case studies on the site if you want to see how it's gone in practice.

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