Renuka Visvanathan recognised amongst the ‘Healthy Ageing 50: leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older’

We congratulate Renuka Visvanathan – Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Adelaide – who has been recognised amongst fifty individuals from around the world as part of the first ever Healthy Ageing 50: leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older.

The individuals were evaluated by an expert panel of reviewers from across international organizations with over 500 nominations received across all Sustainable Development Goal regions.

“The UN Decade of Healthy Ageing offers us an unprecedented opportunity to put in place the right policies and services, so that more people experience later life in good health and can continue to do the things they value,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization. “I have the pleasure of recognising these world-changing leaders who, often with limited resources, show what can be done – and how – to improve health and wellbeing for older persons.”

Renuka leads the National Health and Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence in Frailty and Healthy Ageing (CRE) where a recent research output has pioneered the development of a socio-environmental index that predicts admission to long-term care. She is also the Head of Unit of the Aged and Extended Care Services of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in South Australia since 2005.

But Renuka is most proud of her contributions to the development of clinical services for older people in Malaysia (her country of birth), for example through the training of multi-disciplinary teams of clinicians, funded by the Ministry of Health or Education of Malaysia since 2007.

Renuka Visvanathan has also collaborated with Malaysian research physicians to evaluate and implement new screening tools such as the pictorial fit frail scale (PFFS), whose benefit for low- and middle-income countries where patients had low literacy was immediately apparent. She has also contributed to the opening of publicly-funded Community Geriatrics clinics in the Sarawak area of Malaysia, where patients screened to be frail have access to personalised social, exercise and nutrition interventions as well as clinical review from family physicians with interest in care for older people. 

Read more about the Healthy Ageing 50 here.