Age related functional decline can profoundly affect an older person and is often the prompt to seek support from social care. In Australia there is a policy level focus on concepts such as reablement, which seeks to support people to optimise their ageing experience, and through social care provide strategies that enable older people to maximise their functional ability and maintain optimal independence.

Research suggests that a contributing factor to the lack of engagement with reablement, from a provider and client perspective, is lack of understanding about how people functionally decline with age and how this decline can be compressed to enable people to stay actively engaged and enjoy a good quality of life in later years.

The LifeCurve™ based on the concept of Compression of Functional Decline (CFD) is a framework that demonstrates patterns of age-related decline experienced by older adults. It shows the functional abilities that older people lose over time, the order in which they lose them and opportunities for intervention. The LifeCurve ™ seeks not to tell people what to do but shows the consequences of inaction.

By using the LifeCurve ™ framework, care providers can engage in meaningful conversations with individuals and their families about reablement, fostering a collaborative approach to care that focuses on promoting independence and well-being.

This presentation will describe how providers working alongside older people can use this framework to facilitate reablement conversations, reflect on their functional abilities, identify opportunities for intervention and facilitate improved engagement with reablement in supporting independence.