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The consequences of population ageing for Australia are increasingly debated at a national and state level. Ageing issues on the policy agenda now reflect the need to take a broader societal approach. However, the evidence to inform policy is still lacking in a number of areas. In particular, more needs to be understood about ageing from the community perspective, including evidence on values and attitudes across the generations and the expectations and needs of older age groups. This paper explores the evidence on community perspectives and attitudes on ageing and the extent to which it has informed policy and program development. Using illustrations from Queensland, key policy challenges presented by some of the broader emerging issues will be highlighted, along with possible strategies for policy development in the future.

Concerns about quality and standards of care in the nursing and residential home sector have exercised policymakers, managers and practitioners in both Australia and the UK for some years. While Australia is a relatively young country, demographically speaking, it has in place a coherent ‘aged care’ policy. The UK on the other hand, with its rapidly ageing profile, has only recently made a serious policy commitment to the health and social care agenda for older people. Australia therefore has several years of experience to be shared with the UK when it comes to policy and practice of quality improvement. In particular, there are valuable lessons to be learnt from Australia's national outcome standards and monitoring system for care homes, and its more recent introduction of a care homes accreditation system. Apart from identifying any issues associated with the implementation of such approaches to quality improvement, it is important to establish whether they have an impact on the quality of care and life of older residents. As the UK moves to implementing national minimum standards in 2002, lessons from Australia are timely and may help inform best practice and policy in long‐term care in the future.

Taking the views of the residents of homes into account is an important objective in the context of community care reforms. This article describes the development in Australia of a systematic, credible approach to realising that objective and recommends a similar application in the UK.

The importance of mental health promotion is increasingly being recognised as a policy issue in the UK, although little is known yet about progress towards implementing mental health promotion approaches within mental health services. This paper presents an overview of the topic, and reports on a survey of local authorities in England to identify examples of good practice in mental health promotion and the extent to which they are underpinned by evidence.

By applying a futures approach to ageing of the population, Queensland has the opportunity to plan for changing aspirations of all of society – working to achieve identified preferred outcomes for society, rather than planning for problems or just for a specific target group. Queensland 2020: A State for All Ages is a project that aims to encourage whole‐of‐government and community debate on the structural ageing of the population and the interconnected needs of all generations. It focuses on government planning frameworks and aims to generate a transformational shift in how government, business and community organisations view the ageing of the population. To focus community debate and inform government planning, the project identified four key areas and commissioned academic stimulus papers to address these issues from an intergenerational perspective. These four areas were a futures focus; an ageing perspective; a youth perspective; and a human service planning perspective.

Two more unlikely bedfellows than marketing and the British National Health Service would have been difficult to find five years ago. Increasing demand, making a profit and competing for customers were less than burning issues for the NHS. However, now that discussion of such topics as internal markets, income generation and close co‐operation with the private health care sector is commonplace, marketing would appear to have a great deal more relevance to the public health care sector.