Shaping Lifelong Health
Challenge Theme
About the Challenge
The Shaping Lifelong Health Challenge is the Central Coast Health & Wellbeing Living Lab’s new initiative, focused on prevention from midlife onwards. It brings together community members, carers, services, researchers and partners to create opportunities for people to live well and thrive into later life.
Together, we can build opportunities that make it easier for people to live well and thrive at every stage of life.
Our focus
This Challenge explores three key themes:
Healthy Bodies: moving well, nutrition and oral health
Healthy Minds: brain health, dementia prevention and digital inclusion
Healthy Participation: age-friendly places, purpose and contribution
What we’ll do together
Over the coming months we’ll follow these steps:
Community consultation – workshops and conversations with local groups and individuals.
Sharing insights – feeding back community priorities in a plain-language summary.
Collaboration – inviting services, researchers and partners to propose ideas through an Expression of Interest (EOI).
Piloting projects – selected projects will be supported for development and testing.
What we’ve heard so far
In an early community workshop held as part of the Shaping Lifelong Health Challenge, participants shared perspectives on what supports wellbeing as people age, and what can make this harder.
Some of the key themes raised included:
Staying physically active, mobile and strong was closely linked to independence and confidence.
Social connection, purpose and feeling valued were raised as just as important as physical health.
Barriers such as transport, cost, access to services and digital confidence were commonly discussed.
Brain health and dementia risk generated strong interest, alongside a desire for practical, everyday support.
Many participants expressed a wish to contribute their skills and experience, but felt opportunities were limited or hard to navigate.
These themes are explored in more detail in a short report capturing this initial community conversation:
👉 Read the Shaping Lifelong Health Community Insights Report (PDF)
Get involved
Shaping Lifelong Health is an ongoing conversation, and we’re keen to continue connecting with people and organisations interested in prevention and wellbeing from midlife onwards.
You might be interested in getting involved if you are:
a community member with lived experience to share
part of a community organisation, service or industry working in this space
a researcher interested in prevention, healthy ageing or community-based approaches
Building on early community conversations, the Central Coast Health & Wellbeing Living Lab is preparing to open an Expression of Interest process for collaborative projects in mid-April 2026, focused on piloting practical community-informed ideas.
To learn more, please contact us at ccll@newcastle.edu.au.
Why it matters
By age 65, two in three Australians are living with at least one chronic condition, and nearly half live with two or more (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022). Dementia is now the second leading cause of death (ABS, 2022), and social isolation remains a powerful predictor of poor health outcomes.
The good news is prevention works. Healthy habits, strong social connections and supportive environments in our 40s–60s can delay or prevent illness, frailty and decline. Every $1 invested in prevention is estimated to return about $14 in health and social benefits (Australian Government, National Preventive Health Strategy, 2021).
Curious about how we approach innovation?
We use a Living Lab approach to bring people together to design, test, and deliver real-world solutions.