Abstract
With the rapid growth of older populations, policy interest is increasingly concerned with the most effective and efficient mechanisms to sustain health and quality of life for ageing individuals and communities. Such concerns assume particular significance in rural Australia where rising numbers of older people are located in declining communities, often remote from facilities and services. Appropriate planning and service delivery is fundamentally dependent on a clear understanding of the dimensions of wellness among the aged and of the way this varies across space. Composite area-based indexes such as SEIFA, developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, capture spatial variations in overall socio-economic status within Australia and indexesspecific to older people have been developed to facilitate international comparisons (http://www.helpage.org/global-agewatch/) but a comprehensive summary indexcapturing diversity in wellbeing at the local level is as yet lacking. We draw on the international literature to identify key dimensions of aged wellbeing and assemble a range of census and administrative statistics to measure these features in rural communities across Australia. We compare aged wellbeing in metropolitan and non-metropolitan populations and construct a dedicated index that reveals marked spatial differentials between rural communities.
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Notes
- 1.
Rural Australia here defined as those SA2s with no part in an urban agglomeration of 10,000 persons or more.
- 2.
ABS definition of Major Urban and Other Urban comprises all centres which contain 1000 people or more (ABS Census Dictionary 2011 Catalogue 2901.0, ABS Canberra).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
In separate work we introduce a number of measures drawn from other domains in Table 9.1 including: (1) SEIFA scores, (2) crime rates (3) population density (4) distance to nearest medical facility and (5) a relative remoteness index
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Acknowledgments
The work reported in this paper forms part of the ASPIRE (Ageing Services and suPports In Rural Environments) project. We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Australian Research Council under ARC Linkage Project LP120200226 and from our project partners the Victorian Department of Health, UnitingCare Queensland and South West Hospital and Health Service Queensland. We also wish to acknowledge with thanks the support of other members of the ASPIRE team: Professor Jeni Warburton (lead CI), Dr Rachel Winterton, Dr Maree Petersen, Dr Suzanne Hodgkin, Professor Norah Keating, Professor Jill Wilson, Jacquie Eales and Turi Berg. The views and findings reported here do not necessarily represent the views of the Industry Partners or of other members of the research team.
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Bell, M., Cooper, J. (2016). Measuring Spatial Variations in Wellness Among Australia’s Rural Aged. In: Wilson, T., Charles-Edwards, E., Bell, M. (eds) Demography for Planning and Policy: Australian Case Studies. Applied Demography Series, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22135-9_9
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