The transdisciplinary imperative: Health and aged care management in an era of compounding challenge

Health and aged care systems are increasingly confronted by ageing-related challenges that exceed the boundaries of any single discipline, profession, sector, or policy domain. This commentary proposes a transdisciplinary framework for health and aged care management as a shift from parallel domain-specific reforms to the deliberate design of structurally interconnected systems. We argue that workforce design, models of care, technology, governance, financing, and place-based environments must be understood as mutually constitutive elements of healthy ageing systems rather than discrete areas of improvement. The papers included in this special issue illustrate this systems-oriented framework across diverse contexts, including Saudi Arabia, Thailand, India, Finland, Malaysia, the Asia-Pacific region, and community care settings in high-income countries. Collectively, they demonstrate that reforms are more effective when governance arrangements align workforce capability, digital infrastructure, financing mechanisms, referral pathways, community legitimacy, and accountability structures. Conversely, siloed reform can exacerbate inequities, particularly in low- middle-income countries where fragmented systems divert scarce resources and shift hidden costs to families and communities. We argue that future research in health and aged care management should move beyond evaluating standalone innovations towards examining the "connective tissue" of reform: how integration is designed, governed, financed, implemented, measured, scaled, and sustained across systems. Transdisciplinary integration should therefore be understood not as a rhetorical aspiration, but as a practical governance discipline for ageing societies.