Celebrating aged care employees

On Friday 7 August, we celebrated aged care employees. To thank our vital aged care workers, our healthy@home consortium profiled some of the valued staff employed by its service provider members.

PAUL YOUNG is an Exercise Physiologist at BallyCara, a member of the healthy@home aged care consortium. Paul, who has been working at BallyCara for more than two years and was originally a professional athlete, completing a Bachelor in Sports and Exercise Science in 2006. He then joined the Metropolitan Police force in his native England but after five years, realised he wasn’t getting enough satisfaction from the job.

Paul quit the force and became a personal trainer, completing his Personal Trainer Certificate in 2012 and gaining Precision Nutrition Certification in 2014. This in turn
led him to the realisation that most people he worked with had some sort of illness or injury and this piqued his interest in the next step.

“I saw that a lot of my personal training clients had similar problems and I decided I wanted to go down that road,” he says.
After arriving in Australia almost five years years ago, he decided it was time to get serious about personal training and completed his Masters in Clinical Exercise
Physiology at the Charles Sturt University.

But it has been his work with BallyCara that has led him to what he loves most and does best. “Everything we do in aged care is very rewarding,” he says. “The elderly have good stories to tell drawn from vast life experiences. They have a great sense of humour and most of all, they really want to do their exercise sessions and are not being forced into it.”

His fitness philosophy is simple: “Every individual should be treated like a professional athlete in their journey to achieve their goals. Treatments and attention to detail previously only available to professional athletes should be accessible to everyone.”

He specialises in musculoskeletal rehabilitation including post-surgical rehab and injury prevention, chronic disease management, improving balance and falls prevention, and weight management.

Paul sees every day that exercise makes a very real difference to lives. “They are able to do things they
couldn’t do before,” he says. “It’s very rewarding seeing exercise make a difference and lives improve.”

To read all of the aged care employee profiles visit the healthy@home website.