This year’s Retirement Living Summit at The Star Brisbane was a revelation. For the first time, we saw an industry moving to embrace its reality: residents need care, and that care is best addressed proactively rather than reactively.
We saw it in two of the headline sessions, the panel “Care Ready Communities: Models, Roles, Realities” and the keynote “Belonging by Design: Living Well with Dementia.” Some of our favourite people spoke to some of our favourite topics: Karmen Regan (Head of Care Governance, LDK), Aaron Levitt (CEO, Odyssey) and Marie Alford (Head of Innovation, HammondCare). Marie was joined on stage by James Poulos of Anglicare, who spoke to their shared ambitions and the work HammondCare has supported across Anglicare’s communities.
Eevi was on the ground throughout, with Founder and Managing Director David Waldie and Head of Research Michael Lusis representing the team and exhibiting our Dementia Monitoring solution, recently named Innovation of the Year for Dementia Monitoring at the 2026 Ageing Asia World Ageing Festival.
We believe wellness and care services are a central offering of the most successful seniors’ communities in Australia. Seniors are moving in later, with more complex care needs, and they do not wish to move again. Even when they do, there simply aren’t enough residential aged care beds to take them. So it was heartening to watch faith-based not-for-profits like Anglicare and Baptist Care roll care into their communities, and leaders such as Byron Cannon, Phil Usher, Simon Miller and Charles Moore make the bold decision to embed care where their residents already live.
It spoke volumes that Village Manager of the Year went to Michelle Bennett, who leads a team of more than 200 staff delivering exceptional care and community services to LDK Greenway residents. And that the Community Innovation Award was won by Retire Australia for the Care Hub at The Verge. We were glad, too, to see Anglicare’s Imogen Herperger recognised as one of the sector’s up-and-coming young talents.
Across the two days, we were fortunate to spend time with teams from right across the sector, among them ECH, with several new builds underway in Adelaide, along with Vasey Communities, Arcadia Group, Churches of Christ Care, Masonic Care WA, Basscare, Catholic Healthcare, Keyton, the Villages Group, Castle Hill RSL Group, Montefiore Homes and Pinnacle Living. We also met the architects and advisers helping to shape these communities, including ThompsonAdsett, Synergy Management Group, TMCO, One Fell Swoop and Paynters. Different organisations at different stages, but a striking number arrived with the same question: how do we bring care to residents where they already live?
What operators were really talking about
The conversations on the floor were not the ones we were having a year ago. Operators wanted to talk about how to embed care into their communities, and about the very real challenges that come with it. Falls. Residents who wander, and the worry that sits with the teams responsible for them. How to support people to live well with dementia, for longer, in the place they call home. These are the problems care teams carry every day, and they were front of mind right across the room.
One theme came up again and again: the need to respond to the right call in the right way. Not every call for help is an emergency, and not every situation needs the most senior person on shift. A resident who has dropped a book needs something very different from a resident who has had a fall. Operators want to intelligently triage that difference, so teams can spend their time and skills where they matter most.
There was real appetite, too, for the data and clinical insight that good technology can surface, and a clear consensus among the operators, architects and advisers we spoke with that the future is cloud-based.
A turning point worth marking
We left the Summit optimistic. A year ago, embedding care into retirement living sat on the edges of the conversation. This year it was the conversation, and that is a credit to the operators, advisers and care teams leading the change.
eevi is proud to be part of it. eeviCare is modular, cloud-based and purpose-built for the continuum of care, not adapted from a hospital system, and it is Australian-owned, trusted today by more than 100 communities and monitoring over 10,000 lives across Australia.
If you are building a new care facility today, or embedding care into an existing village, you should talk to eevi. Visit eevi.life or call 1300 802 738.