Meaningful Ageing Australia

Meaningful Ageing Australia is the Australian national peak body for spiritual care and ageing. We are a not-for-profit, supporting organisations and groups to respond to the pastoral and spiritual needs of older people, their significant others, and their carers. We advocate for spiritual care to be included in all care settings. Our mission is to ensure that all older Australians have access to high quality pastoral and spiritual care. Spirituality is integral to, but not not confined by, religion and faith. It is about what gives us a purpose to our lives. It is about our sources of meaning and hope, which in turn is intimately related to our connectedness to ourselves, to others and to the world. There is now a large body of emerging evidence showing that pastoral and spiritual care is an essential part of holistic care for everyone, particularly older people including, importantly, those with dementia. The World Health Organisation views spirituality as inextricably linked to quality of life. Recent studies have demonstrated that spiritual health both predicted well- being and an older person’s ability to adjust to the challenges of ageing. We know that there are many organisations which value and strive to provide high quality pastoral and spiritual care but are sometimes constrained from doing so by time and resource issues or lack of specialised skills. We also know that there are many working in aged care who understand the value of pastoral and spiritual care and want to have the conversations around spirituality, but tend to stay at a superficial level because they don’t feel they have the knowledge or skills to respond at a deeper level. We support our members by providing the information and tools you need to deliver high quality pastoral and spiritual care.