The Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) is proving to be a valuable and highly versatile data resource that is providing the foundation for focused research to improve the health and wellbeing of older Australian through advances in Aged Care.
ROSA, established in 2017, is the first aged care data platform of its kind in Australia, that combines data sourced from the health, aged care and social welfare sectors with robust analytics to conduct research that will translate to improvements in Australia’s burgeoning aged care sector.
“We are examining important national data and learning so much more about the experiences of people in aged care than I ever anticipated,” says Professor Maria Inacio, Director of the ROSA Research Centre at the Caring Futures Institute and South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute.
ROSA was established by SAHMRI with the support of the Government of South Australia as a partnership between Flinders University as the lead university partner, further input from the University of Adelaide and University of South Australia, and aged care providers including Silverchain, ECH Inc, Bolton Clarke, plus the Council on the Ageing SA (COTA SA), SA NT DataLink and SA Health. It has been supported by Medical Research Future Fund infrastructure grants since 2021.
Flinders University’s input to the ROSA Research Centre, which has now grown to a team of 32 people, provides a key to furthering the impact of this important registry and its research.
“The synergy of partnership between Flinders University and SAHMRI at the core of the ROSA Research Centre comes at a critical juncture, maturing into a crucial national ageing and aged care research centre and expanding its portfolio. The team is excited about our future working together to deliver important evidence on how to better care for older people,” Professor Inacio says.
Professor Inacio, an epidemiologist with expertise in population health surveillance and utilisation of existing data and informatics to undertake this work, says that through levering existing national and state existing data we can understand the health, service utilisation, medication use, mortality and other important outcomes experienced by older people and also obtain a complete picture of the ageing pathway in Australia.
Its usefulness came into sharp focus when the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety commenced in late 2018, and looked to ROSA as a crucial information resource, to accurately map out the current state of quality and safety experiences in aged care in Australia – and from this make recommendations about the future of improved aged care.
In the years since, ROSA’s research has also focused on a number of other important areas affecting older people – from such diverse areas as frailty and dementia, through to such specifics as examining links between skin cancer and cataract surgery for older people.
It also fields increasing numbers of requests for specific data sets – and from this, a multitude of improvements to aged care are being made.
As an example, the oral health of older people – an area far outside the usual field of vision for ROSA – but this has led to crucial reports to support much needed action in the sector.
“Australia is a data-rich country so we should to learn more from all the information available – and this means breaking down the silos that many specific sources of data are contained in and bringing them all together so we can clearly read the complete picture,” says Professor Inacio.
“What we are doing is learning from the existing data in greater detail, and avoiding needing to burden older people and the aged care sector to provide further information.”
Having initially placed an emphasis on examining residential care for older people, ROSA is now focusing on several new areas, including home care and the influence workforce has on quality and safety of care delivered in the aged care sector.
“In the ROSA team’s most recent new study we have planned a large body of work that will look at the existing workforce mix, their training, their employment patterns and the effect that it has on the well-established quality and safety measures that the ROSA team has developed. This work will provide a more intricate picture of this complex relationships and make evidence-based recommendations for this workforce,” says Professor Inacio.
“To find answers where there are gaps in knowledge, we are very collaborative, working with a number of experts from multiple areas in all our projects.”
The ROSA Research Centre also provides a yearly report on its findings to all South Australians via its website – rosaresearch.org – plus 350 separate reports to state based aged care providers so they can compare and benchmark their services to other South Australian organisations. This is amplifying the value of ROSA’s work – and illustrating its vast potential for the future.
“We are getting more specific requests each year,” says Professor Inacio. “We are now at a critical juncture with our work, but with ROSA we have the right vehicle at the right time with the right people to make very good things happen.”
Read more about how Flinders have taken the lead with ROSA.