Why I Started Age Brightly (And What I Wish I'd Known Sooner)

My background is in finance and law. I spent years helping people protect their wealth, plan their futures, and make smart decisions about money. But it took a single conversation with a client to make me realise I'd never once thought seriously about the one thing that underpins all of it: health.

She came to see me needing help putting her mother into a rest home. Her mum had been diagnosed with dementia. What struck me wasn't just the heartbreak of the situation — it was the shock of the system. The cost was staggering. Health insurance didn't cover it. Accessing the right support was confusing and slow. And most painfully: her mum didn't want to go.

I went home and had the same conversation with my own parents. They're in their early seventies. They said they didn't want to go into a rest home either. But when I asked what their plan was to prevent that — there wasn't one. They had health insurance, a GP they saw occasionally, and my mum does a daily Wordle. I love my mum, but I'm not sure that's going to cut it.

That's when I started asking hard questions. I spoke to geriatricians, clinical pharmacists, neuropsychologists. I took our Chief Medical Officer to Southland for two weeks to understand what was actually happening in our health system — especially in the regions, where the gaps are even wider. What we found confirmed what I'd suspected: our system is reactive, siloed, and constrained. It waits for things to go wrong before it responds.

Here's the number that stopped me in my tracks: 70 to 80% of unplanned hospital admissions in the areas we studied were considered preventable. Not inevitable. Preventable.

And yet, nine out of ten rest home admissions follow a hospital stay. If we want to help our parents — or ourselves — stay out of a rest home, we have to keep them out of hospital first. And to do that, we have to get ahead of the decline that puts them there.

That's the idea behind Age Brightly. We're New Zealand's first private gerontology service. We work with geriatricians — the specialists who sit at the very top of older person care — alongside a full multidisciplinary team: pharmacists, physiotherapists, dieticians, neuropsychologists, and more. Our job is to find the risks before they become events.

This isn't about being pessimistic about aging. It's about being honest that decline doesn't begin with a fall or a hospital admission. It begins quietly, years earlier — and that's exactly where we want to be. Early enough to change the trajectory.

If you're in your sixties or seventies and thinking "I should probably be doing something about this," you're right. And if you're an adult child watching your parents slow down and wondering what you can do, I understand that feeling more than most.

The good news: there's a lot we can do. And today is a better day to start than tomorrow.