Seniors services‘on par’

Victorian GLBT aged-care support service Val’s Café said Australia rivals its international peers when it comes to supporting GLBT seniors.

Fresh from a Gay and Lesbian Medical Association conference in California last month, Val’s Café founder and La Trobe University researcher Catherine Barrett said she believes Victoria has managed to develop a support network in which mainstream service providers are actively involved in responding to the needs of GLBT seniors.

“It was really interesting to see the difference between what’s going on in California and the work we’re doing here,” Barrett told Southern Star Observer.

“At the start I was worried about how we are doing over here, because gay and lesbian seniors over there are really visible.

“[In the US] there’s been something of a focus on the provision of specific [GLBT] services, but what that means is generic services aren’t necessarily taking it up.”

Barrett said Val’s s Café, which began in 2009 and has been building numbers ever since, is about working with existing mainstream aged-care service providers to mentor them to make their services more GLBT-friendly rather than establishing a GLBT-specific body for aged care services.

“In California they were absolutely gob-smacked. They couldn’t believe that we were doing it and organisations were responding so positively to it.

“Really what we’ve got now in Victoria is a group of people becoming champions of GLBTI inclusive practice, so if we can keep doing things this way, we’ll be able to build a groundswell across a range of services rather than working with resistance.”

Last week, 11 organisations — including four council health services, Alzheimer’s Australia, Better Hearing Australia and a seniors information service — started Val’s Café’s first training course to improve their services.

Barrett said the six workshops over 12 months will cover ways to recognise GLBT seniors, including starting a community consultation, developing action plans and undertaking an auditing of current services and staff attitudes.

“The thing we’re doing differently is really saying, older people are everywhere and other than Linton Estate in Ballan [Australia’s first GLBT retirement village, yet to be built], we’ve got no specific services for older people, so what we need to do is engage the mainstream and get them on board.”

Barrett said the response from aged-care service providers so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
“People love it, for something really concrete, because it’s one thing to say you need to be inclusive of GLBTI people, but I think busy service providers ask what does that mean.

“So we’re being really practical about it.”

Barrett’s 2008 study My People revealed many Victorian GLBTI seniors live in fear of aged-care services, concerned at being outed and misunderstood.

info: Victorian Seniors Festival runs from October 3-10.