Today on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, Insignia Financial through its charitable foundation, The IOOF Foundation, is proud to announce our support of a new educational series on the ‘Ask Annie’ mobile app, in partnership with Dementia Australia.

This new module aims to improve care workers’ knowledge of financial elder abuse. Building awareness of financial elder abuse and caring for vulnerable members of our community supports our ambition to create financial wellbeing for all Australians.

Dementia Australia’s ‘Ask Annie’ mobile app offers short, self-paced learning modules for care workers, so they can refresh their skills and learn new tips and tools when caring for people living with dementia. All lessons are based on real-life situations and has been designed to suit the needs of all types of carers including culturally and linguistically diverse and indigenous communities.

For the first time, the 'Ask Annie' app includes a module on financial elder abuse and a new character, Dom, a virtual elder abuse advocate, is introduced to the ‘Ask Annie’ modules. Part of our support has enabled this module to be available to all care workers at no cost. For more information, please visit Dementia learning.

Our partnership with Dementia Australia

The IOOF Foundation has committed to a $300,000 partnership with Dementia Australia over the next two years to increase awareness of financial elder abuse for those most vulnerable in our community.

Dementia Australia exists to support and empower the estimated 500,000 Australians living with dementia and almost 1.6 million people involved in their care. Dementia is the second leading cause of death in Australia yet remains one of the most challenging and misunderstood conditions.

Today’s announcement is stage one of our ongoing partnership with Dementia Australia. The next stage is to develop a tailored, e-learning program designed for professionals working in the finance and banking sector to help them identify financial abuse in people within the community.

To see Ask Annie in action, watch the demonstration.

Read the media release.