Community living provides healthier outcomes for longer

Research shows people living in a retirement village are happier and more physically active, and it translates into better health outcomes with reduced levels of depression and loneliness.

Retirement villages offer a connected and happier lifestyle for residents

With the number of people over the age of 65 projected to make up more than a fifth of the nation’s population by 2066, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the focus on how we ensure people stay healthier for longer is only going to increase.

At the recent Housing, Health and Happiness roundtable hosted by Keyton, participants agreed Australia needed to look more closely at how to ensure older people can live the healthiest, most productive and enjoyable lives possible.

Speaking at the roundtable, Retirement Living Council executive director Daniel Gannon highlighted the Council’s research that indicated people living in a retirement village were 41 per cent happier and 15 per cent more physically active than those who did not live in a village.

Further, the RLC’s Better Housing for Better Health report showed retirement community residents were 20 per cent less likely to require hospitalisation after only nine months. Furthermore, national expenditure on aged care would be reduced by $945m annually by delaying entry of 11,600 retirement village residents into residential aged care by two years.

Gannon said: “Put bluntly, we have this happier and healthier value proposition in retirement communities that is hiding in plain sight.

“In every suburb across the country, they are doing so much heavy lifting for different parts of the communities for federal, state and local governments as well as older Australian consumers.”

Fellow roundtable participant, Keyton chief executive, Nathan Cockerill, emphasised the economies of scale on the health front retirement communities provide citing home care as an example.

Nathan Cockerill, Chief Executive Officer, Keyton, told the Housing, Health and Happiness Roundtable retirement villages meant less travel time. Photo: Jeremy Piper /New Romans

“With home care, people are spending 40 per cent of their time travelling from location to location. In a retirement village, you cut out that travel time in totality,” Cockerill said. “If you look at the average size of a retirement village, which is around 100 homes, there’s an opportunity to provide care to around 150 residents in one spot.”

According to Gannon, removing the duplication in transport means investing “more care per dollar with the actual consumer”.

“So, while the federal government is struggling with increasing demand for home care services, we can actually help solve the problem simply by having operator-directed care alongside consumer-directed care,” he said. “A community can determine they want to pool their funding.

“What this means for a Keyton community, for example, is you could take that pooled funding and invest it wonderfully into all sorts of amenities such as having allied health professionals 24/7 on site.”

Daniel Gannon, Executive Director, Retirement Living Council, told the Housing, Health and Happiness Roundtable research indicated people living in a retirement village were happier. Photo: Jeremy Piper /New Romans

While the health savings are significant, Cockerill also pointed other nuanced community benefits retirement living provides such as the facilities and reduced traffic flows around villages compared to other residential developments, meaning they have less of an impact on a local area especially in high-density urban settings.

Ethos Urban director of planning Karen Armstrong highlighted how having a plethora of health and wellness facilities in a concentrated area assists older Australians to remain active and socially engaged. She said government planners at all levels should better take this into account when looking at approving new retirement village developments. Armstrong suggested governments needed to look more closely at what retirement villages offer rather than thinking they’re a one-size-fits-all for the over-60s.

“There can be three or four generations of people living in retirement villages with very different interests, needs and expectations,” Armstrong said.

“For example, people are working longer and more flexibly, so they could still be working in a retirement village while others have long retired.”☺

For Armstrong, getting the mix of facilities and services right across these generations is a challenge for village providers.

“As a planner I find it interesting to see the scope of what these villages are offering in terms of health and wellness facilities, and essentially, they’re offering what governments are providing in the local community. Yet retirement villages must pay the same contributions for this community infrastructure as all other developments, while their facilities actually ease the demands on local facilities. The providers are meeting the needs of their residents as well as creating a quality lifestyle as well.

“I think the planning system could better recognise the advantages these village facilities provide for people,” Armstrong said.

Speaking of the planning system, industry participants at the roundtable said they were frustrated by the rather opaque government planning regimes across the nation.

“Planning systems can get a bit congested,” Gannon said, “with 33 per cent of retirement village development applications in NSW for example taking more than two years to be completed. This is before shovels hit the ground.”

Ethos Urban director of planning Karen Armstrong says getting the mix of facilities and services right across generations is a challenge for village providers.

While acknowledging approval processes were a little lengthy and planning systems hadn’t evolved as quickly as the evolving nature of retirement, Executive Director of the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, Tom Loomes, said the state government was committed to working with the sector to bring about change.

He said over the past 30 years or so, most zoning decisions for retirement villages saw them pushed out to the edge of local government areas but things were changing.

“There is an opportunity in the strategic planning side of my business to really help shake up that narrative of where we expect our ageing population to live because it’s not on the fringes next to golf clubs anymore, it is in our town centres,” he said.

While Loomes said the focus of the NSW government was on more housing and affordable housing there was potential for a change in the planning policy framework for seniors.

Moreover, he said the current state government wanted to better understand the retirement living sector as a whole and really “get under the hood to understand the challenges beyond just planning” such as construction, management and finance so the “planning system can help resolve (some of these challenges) at the front-end”.

Gannon said if local and state governments could help lower the cost of development, a lot more housing could be built.

“You’re paying thousands of dollars before putting any houses on the ground so if there was some concession on those, even if it’s in the short term, it would help,” he said.

For Cockerill, part of the problem is local councils across the nation do not have the resources to really look at the volume of development applications coming through and do not really understand the retirement living sector.

“You don’t see any councils saying retirement living is a priority despite the fact that more than 30 per cent of their constituents are often over the age of 60,” he said.

“With our ageing population, we need to look for a solid retirement housing solution now so we can create more affordable age-friendly accommodation and communities.”

Gannon said the industry was more than willing to work with governments on a solution. “We would love to see governments everywhere start to solve that problem with us, especially given the demographic ‘silver tsunami’ that is starting to impact housing markets and healthcare systems nationwide. We’re not asking for handouts, we’re just asking for governments to consider the health and lifestyle efficiencies that can be generated by this housing type and recognise the potential savings long-term.”

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