Home care just the way you want it

Ballarat’s Maggie Ashford may not have met Mahatma Gandhi, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who demonstrates one of Gandhi’s famous quotes better: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

When spending time with Maggie, it’s easy to admire her thirst for knowledge and be inspired by her buoyant demeanour.

Maggie is currently learning artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of the Third Age, she volunteers at Ballarat’s “living museum” Sovereign Hill, and she also loves walking and her weekly dose of line dancing.

Add to this Maggie’s past work as a community nurse in a remote village in Papua New Guinea (PNG), and you get a sense of the authentic and selfless person Maggie is.

“I think study is very beneficial for your health altogether,” Maggie says.

“Really, as you get older, your ability to think and remember deteriorates, so you need to exercise your brain as much as you possibly can.

“You need to keep up to date, because in my lifetime, the invention of computers and the technological change that has happened, it all changes so fast.

“What you know today is out of date by tomorrow, so you’ve got to keep with it all the time.”

Home care on your terms

On first impression, you wouldn’t think Maggie needs too much help around the home, but as she puts it, “My level of care has varied according to my health,” and what she does receive “helps me remain independent.”

Home care with cleaning tasks around the house, Meals on Wheels, installation of rails and anti-slip plates, a fall alarm, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, gardening, cleaning windows, and even support with shopping when seriously unwell. Maggie says the support she has received from Australian Unity Home Care has “allowed me to do what I still can do for myself, but they help me with the things that I'm not able to do.”

“I think they've been excellent,” Maggie adds. “Diana, my Care Partner, has been extraordinarily helpful. It can be difficult to negotiate the departments you need to go through for an assessment or to increase your services. Even though, as a nurse, I should have known all of that, it can be a difficult system to navigate.”

For Maggie, the support she receives from Australian Unity helps her focus on what she’d rather be spending her time and energy doing: volunteering, studying, and enjoying life in Ballarat.

“It helps me to do the things that I really want to do outside of my home,” Maggie says.

“Australian Unity helps me in the home with things that I find difficult to do, and that frees me up to do the things that I would like to do, for example, volunteer at Sovereign Hill.”

Community at the heart of wellbeing

Maggie’s volunteer work at Sovereign Hill involves working in costume to demonstrate what it was like for the pioneers of the Gold Rush in the 1850s.

Maggie says this work helps boost her health and wellbeing by offering a sense of achieving in life, providing community connection, as well as supporting her ongoing cognitive health.

“I've worked at Sovereign Hill as a volunteer for the last 10 years and I really enjoy working there,” Maggies explains.

“Because I have to keep my brain very active—and I have to be physically active as well, because Sovereign Hill is on a hill—I have to be mentally accurate and keep a lot of information in my head about the history of Ballarat and of the discovery of gold.

“We get visitors literally from all over the world. When I travel overseas, I often say I'm a volunteer at Sovereign Hill, and many people actually know where Sovereign Hill is, which is quite amazing, really.”

Wellbeing on the frontline

Maggie’s best stories recount her career as a nurse. Maggie worked as a registered nurse for 50 years in a variety of professional settings, including intensive care and coronary care. But her time volunteering in PNG stands out as the biggest story of them all.

Working in a community clinic as a remote-area nurse, an hour inland and into the jungle from the provincial city of Rabaul, Maggie explains that professionally she was expected to deal with diseases she had only previously read about in textbooks, with very little equipment or assistance.

“We lived inland from Rabaul, which was quite interesting because, at the time, it was on high volcanic alert, and so we had lots and lots of earthquakes,” she says.

“Two years as a nurse on an exotic tropical island may seem to some like an ideal existence—it certainly had its pleasurable moments—but nothing is perfect in this world.

“So, for me, the greatest advantage was the opportunity to extend my nursing experience far beyond what is normally available in Australia.”

Maggie’s clinical paper from her time in PNG recounts her experience and tells of the challenges she faced, including a lack of medical supplies, poor administration, limited professional support, and in some cases, invasive rodents and insects. Amongst all this, she was the only source of medical care for kilometres.

“We treated a lot of malaria, but also a lot of wounds, because they use machetes all of the time to keep the jungle down,” Maggie says.

“Every morning the children get up at about five o'clock with their long-bladed machetes, and they cut the jungle back. Quite often, we'd have serious cuts that I'd have to suture.

“Sometimes we had other kinds of accidents with things like petrol and diesel and inhalation.”

Asked about her fondest memory from her two-and-a-half years in PNG, and it’s unsurprising that Maggie’s response is about the sense of community spirit she encountered.

“My favourite memory, well, we used to run a choir competition for all of the villages around, including the islands further out,” she recalls. “So, the villagers and children would come in once a year for the competition and sing… and it was very good because our choir won.”

Well… there’s a competitive spirit in Maggie as well! But then again, there was only one Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t there?