Dr Matthew Parsons
Dr Matthew Parsonshas both a PhD and Masters in Gerontology from King’s College London and is a registered nurse.  He has been employed as a senior Lecturer in Gerontology at The University of Auckland, New Zealand for eight years.  Matthew has contributed to various New Zealand national policies including the Health of Older Person Strategy.  He has been the principal investigator on a number of large and innovative research trials including ASPIRE, the MoH funded evaluation of Ageing in Place Initiatives, and the National interRAI evaluation.  Over the last ten years he has been developing new models for home based support services and in 2006 and 2007 has been instrumental in implementing restorative home support across half of New Zealand.

Gerald Pilkington
Gerald Pilkington has over 22 years of experience working in health across the independent sector (acute, long-term care and rehabilitation), National Health Service, and a national efficiency programme across adult social care in England.

Having trained as an accountant and gained experience in a diverse range of industries including healthcare, Gerald moved into general management. He has direct experience leading an acute and long term care provider group with acute and community hospitals, day surgery units, adult care homes and daycare facilities, and a residential rehabilitation unit.

More recently Gerald has worked with the Care Services Efficiency Delivery, as part of the Department of Health’s 3½ year programme to support 150 local authorities to achieve their efficiency targets within adult social care across England.  In addition to being the Operations manager and deputy to the Programme Director, he has led the programme’s work on homecare re-ablement. Working with Councils to build a body of evidence, the Programme has sought to share this with local authorities and provide support for 29 that are establishing new services and a further 70 that are seeking to enhance existing services

Associate Professor Michael Fine
Michael Fine is Associate Professor in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, at Macquarie University, Sydney.  His research and teaching concerns the sociology of ageing and care, with a focus on developments in care provision, the care workforce, links between formal and informal support, individualisation and social isolation.  His recent book, A Caring Society? Care and the Dilemmas of Human Service in the Twenty-First Century, was published by Palgrave MacMillan (2007).

Professor Ann Harding
After working on major policy reviews in several Federal government departments, Ann Harding was appointed Professor of Applied Economics and Social Policy and the inaugural Director of the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) at the University of Canberra in January 1993.  She is an internationally recognised expert in the fields of microsimulation modelling, income distribution, and tax/transfer policy.  Under Ann’s leadership NATSEM has become one of Australia’s leading research centres, having constructed models and undertaken research across a wide spectrum of social and economic policy, including tax, social security, health insurance, hospital usage, pharmaceutical benefits, education, child care, effective marginal tax rates, income inequality, poverty, housing, wealth, child support and intergenerational transfers. In 1996 Ann was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and in 2003 was elected President of the International Microsimulation Association.  Ann holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor of Economics with First Class Honours from Sydney University.

Dr Gill Lewin
Gills’ background is Clinical Psychology, in which she gained both a Masters and a Doctoral degree.  Subsequent to a ten year period in clinical practice, she returned to tertiary studies and gained a Master’s degree in Public Health at the University of Western Australia.  Since then, she has been continually involved in health services research in Western Australia, initially as a consultant working out of the University of Western Australia and now as part of Silver Chain.

Gill has been the Research Manager at Silver Chain for the last 14 years.  During her time at Silver Chain, Gill has been involved in a broad range of health and aged care research and evaluation projects, many of which have involved collaborations with other providers and/or local and inter-state universities.  Gill’s particular research interests include: the development and testing of new service models, promoting independence in older people and the implementation of evidence-based practice.  Gill has been/is responsible for the development, implementation and ongoing research into the effectiveness of the Home Independence Program (HIP).  This program is considered by Gill to demonstrate how a different paradigm for home care services might operate within Australia.

In addition to her position at Silver Chain, Gill also currently holds the positions of: adjunct Associate Professor at the Centre for Research on Ageing at Curtin University of Technology; adjunct Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Postgraduate Medicine at Edith Cowan University; and, President Elect of the Australian Association of Gerontology.

Hilary O’Connell
Hilary O’Connell qualified twenty years ago in the United Kingdom as an Occupational Therapist. Her career in the UK included working as both a clinician and Manager of a Community Care service. During this period Hilary was also instrumental in the development of an enabling service delivery model for high care clients.

Hilary’s eleven years in Western Australia have included working for an ACAT and for Silver Chain, a large Western Australian health, aged and community care provider. During her time at Silver Chain, Hilary worked as part of the team developing and implementing the (HIP) Home Independence Program.

Hilary has been employed since 2005 by CommunityWest Inc, a HACC funded not for profit organisation in Western Australia. Her role, in partnership with the WA Home & Community Care program, has been to manage the development and implementation of the Wellness Approach to Community HomeCare (WATCH).  The wellness approach supports a paradigm shift within the WA HACC program from a predominantly dependency based service model towards the implementation of a wellness service model that can optimise a client’s capacity to live independently at home and in the community.