Renuka Visvanathan – Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Adelaide – is a clinician, researcher, and educator who connects her country of residence, Australia, with her country of birth, Malaysia, in her work to promote health and well-being for older adults. In Australia, Renuka Visvanathan 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, where she oversaw the establishment of a clinical service to ensure that socio-economically disadvantaged and culturally and linguistically diverse older people living in the western suburbs of Adelaide have access to comprehensive geriatric assessment involving multi-disciplinary teams across the continuum of care.
But Renuka Visvanathan is most proud of her contributions to the development of clinical services for older people in Malaysia – for instance, 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. The development of such clinics within the Malaysian public primary care system aligns to the vision of implementing integrated care for older people, and Renuka Visvanathan continues to work to ensure that in time, similar clinics are established throughout all of Malaysia.