Innovative Somerset Alliance receives National nod as 2024 Staying in Place Expo kicks off in Pingelly

About 140 aged care industry representatives, leaders and community members gathered in Pingelly on Wednesday for the 2024 Staying in Place Expo at the Pingelly Recreation and Cultural Centre. Hosted by the Pingelly CRC and the Pingelly Somerset Alliance, the expo showcased Staying in Place, an innovative community-based aged care model. The initiative aims to keep senior members of regional communities comfortable, supported and at home as they age by delivering services locally. Pingelly CRC’s Lee Steel said that the grassroots model had an amazing impact on the community. “What was happening was people were getting to a level where services weren’t being delivered because there wasn’t the ability to deliver them and they were having to leave town,” she said. “We saw couples split up after 60, 70 years when one had to go to another town . . . we are now delivering those services locally and our local seniors’ lives are improving ten-fold. “They’re now staying in town, reconnecting with community, going back and doing the things they used to do and on top of that they’re doing it with support from local people.” The model has created the equivalent of 10 full-time jobs in Pingelly, and attendees were eager to learn about the concept and how it could be implemented in towns around WA. “It is changing communities and changing lives,” Ms Steel said. The two-day expo was officially opened by Shire of Pingelly president Jackie McBurney. “I recall listening to the project manager Helen Morton outline the dreams, aspirations, possibilities, of what the staying in place project could achieve, and thinking to myself ‘well, if they achieve half of those aspirations, we’ve done remarkably well,” she said. “It appears, as you will later hear, that those targets and initial aspirations have been blown out of the water.” Cr McBurney returned from the National Keep Australia Beautiful Tidy Towns Awards held at the weekend in Gascoyne Junction with the National Health and Wellbeing Award that she received on behalf of the Somerset Alliance. Somerset Alliance chairperson David Freebairn and project manager Helen Morton were called up to be presented with the accolade. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the national award, across our whole country,” Cr McBurney said. “This little group from Pingelly has won a National award.” After a keynote address by professor Loretta Baldassar on social ageing, expo attendees engaged in a full program of workshops and talks.