National award winners

Harden Grange Aged Care Community have been crowned winners in the service transformation category of the 2026 Future of Ageing Awards, held in Sydney on Thursday 8 October. Facility manager Laura Knight and local representative of Apollo Care Alliance’s national advisory body Melissa Pinney made the trip to Darling Harbour for the awards last week. The awards take in aged care facilities from all over Australia and New Zealand, underlining the level of achievement for the local home. “We’re really excited but shocked as well, we were up against some big companies,” Ms Knight said. Alongside Apollo Care Alliance the facility has become a beating heart of Harden Murrumburrah since it was opened with the assistance of the Kruger Trust in 2022. “We’ve made a small regional facility viable with local employment and a waiting list, all transformed from a past facility that was shut down,” she said. “For the Harden Grange award they did a bit of a callout and a story, the MC spoke about what an incredible story it’s been,” Ms Pinney added. “A common theme for a lot of the award winners was the importance of actually listening to residents and their families.” Founder of the awards Kate McKeown was full of praise for the winners across the 13 categories, including Harden Grange and Apollo Care Alliance. "The Future of Ageing awards shine a light on the hard work being done to provide safe, sustainable and high quality aged care services to people across Australia,” Ms McKeown said. “Each year, the bar is raised higher in terms of the calibre of entries, which is what we want to see. “The creativity behind so many of the nominated initiatives shows that thinking differently about a problem to drive change doesn’t always need a big budget.”