Joint Submission into Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Support Needs for Older Victorians from Migrant and Refugee Backgrounds

Key recommendations

1. Reduce disparities in migrant and refugee communities by:
   1. Implementing initiatives that educate, upskill and support migrant and refugee family carers to ensure sustainable care relationships with older people.
   2. Implementing intergenerational programmes to increase older migrant and refugees digital literacy, noting their need to access equipment and stable internet connection.
2. Improve the system by:
   1. Enacting legislation and policy that support multi-lingual and culturally appropriate service delivery that recognises the impact of systemic inequality and the impacts of gender, race, and age discrimination, and the challenges of social isolation, language barriers, and cultural disconnection.
   2. Investing in care models that facilitate community-level integration of services (e.g. between family violence, elder abuse, and the variety of cultural groups and services in Victoria).
   3. Building capacity in the health, aged care, and community care sector on how to develop and adapt resources in order to deliver culturally and linguistically responsive services.
   4. Adequately upskilling, resourcing and embedding bilingual workers across health, aged care, and community care sectors.
   5. Engaging migrant and refugee communities, including older people and carers, in the co-design of services through active outreach and consultation by bicultural staff.
3. Improve data quality by:
   1. Improving the consistency of routinely collected data about older migrants and refugees. For example, collecting gender-disaggregated data and adopting relevant FECCA recommendations on data collection.
   2. Investing in participatory research that uses co-design and co-production methods to increase the evidence-base for older migrant and refugee Victorian’s health and wellbeing in Australia.