Specialist non-institutional residential care provider Community Home Australia has been offering supported independent living, day programs and emergency and planned respite services for people with disability and dementia since 2020, as profiled in our June 2021 issue.

Last year the organisation began hosting a series of Leadership Retreats for health and aged care workers held at its Aashaya Jasri resort in Bali. With the second of these retreats held in February, and more planned for the future, we caught up with Community Home Australia Managing Director Dr Rodney Jilek to find out more about this initiative.

“Our first retreat was held last August following a local conference, just to see if there was interest among aged care and disability workers – and there was, so we ran the second this February,” Rodney tells us.

“The idea was to provide an opportunity for people working in aged care and the NDIS to come together and share ideas, with speakers on a range of different topics. This year we had people talking about leadership, the research and development behind an innovative product with aged care applications, and a specialist on person-centred engagement.”

Rodney says the aim was not to replicate a typical Australian conference “where people go and get talked at for eight hours”. Instead, it was designed for a much smaller audience so as to create a more personalised, retreat-style experience.

“A lot of people don’t want to speak in front of 500 or 1000 people, so we structured this for a more intimate group, with a morning and afternoon session each day and the remaining time available for networking, visiting local attractions and participating in cultural events. It’s not solely an opportunity to learn and network but also to recharge your batteries and have some downtime – because as we know aged care and NDIS doesn’t stop for an instant, so it’s really nice to be able to get away while still doing work-related activities.

“Scheduling it in February worked well, as it gave participants a chance to slow down and gather themselves together for the coming year, so I think we will be running it annually at around the same time.”

Care has also been taken to make the event affordable. “A lot of conferences in Australia cost $1000 or more per day and it’s usually facility directors who attend them. Whereas our Leadership Retreat is priced at $1500 for the whole week and that covers food, accommodation, presentations and activities. We’re not doing it to make money – we want to open up the opportunity to people who would not normally attend these kinds of events. We’d like to see people bring their spouses along as well, because it’s often forgotten that partners of these workers tend to live aged care or disability as well, and they often have an interest in the subject matter.”

The retreats have been made possible thanks to Community Home Australia’s purchase of the Aashaya Jasri resort in Bali in early 2024. “The intention was to enhance it so it had the ability to provide respite for people living with dementia or disability,” Rodney explains. “We bought it in April and finished the renovations in September – now we have wheelchair access across the entire 2,500sqm resort, we have medical equipment and two nurses on staff. From September we started bringing over people from Australia who had either been diagnosed with dementia or disability themselves, and in January we hosted a supported holiday for a family of five who had three children with autism.

“More recently we had a profoundly disabled young man come with his mother and two around the clock support workers, and they all had a ball – he went out on our traditional Balinese fishing boat, his mother went to the local markets, they went swimming and horseriding, and just to see the reactions from this non-verbal young man and the looks on his face was priceless, because he was experiencing things that were completely removed from his normal day to day living.

“That’s what we want to provide. The resort is registered with NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission as an official service under Community Home Australia, so we’re able to take people on respite. Instead of going to a supported living house in Australia, they get to go to Bali and experience cultural activities in a completely new environment – and we actually charge less than providers do here in Australia. The reason is simple - it’s actually cheaper to provide those services over there than it is here, so we can afford to charge less.

“We take what would otherwise be our profits and donate that back into our charitable fund, which we use to help people on disability support pension to pay for their airfares and so on, because the NDIS doesn’t cover that. So we pay for the stuff the NDIS won’t fund, so as to make it accessible for everyone regardless of their financial situation.”

Upcoming events for the resort include the International Dementia Innovation conference scheduled for 25-30 September, which Community Home Australia is running in partnership with Alzheimers Indonesia. “This will be bringing speakers from all over Southeast Asia and Europe,” Rodney says, “with a big focus on hearing from people who are living with dementia – they will be speaking on a range of topics. You don’t often get the opportunity to hear from the people who are living with the condition on the challenges they have to face, so that is another point of difference for this event.”

Today Bali is more accessible from Australia than ever – with direct flights from every state capital, it takes as little as three hours’ travel time from Perth and five and a half hours from Sydney. “We had 19 attendees for the February retreat, some from aged care and some from disability services, including a senior manager, plus a couple of technology providers as well.

“It’s a great opportunity to come together, talk and nut out some of the issues and connect with people who’ve been working in the sector for a long time. Plus the location is magical – we’re right on the ocean, it’s a beachfront resort and it’s a quiet area of Bali, away from the bustle of Kuta and Seminyak. We describe it as traditional Bali, a lot slower and more peaceful – but it still has all the services you need, with four international standard hospitals within 6km, which gives us the backup of medical, nursing and allied health support should we need it.”

More information on the resort can be found at https://communityhomeaustralia.org/cha-international-resort-and-place/