Summary of the Contact-the-Elderly conference

A couple of talks of the The-contact-the -elderly conference were very interesting.

Professor Sian Maslin-Prothero's project is a New Dynamics of Aging project and has a team of 6 people. They work on "Community action in Later life" - Manchester Engagement (CALL-ME)
The study adopts a participatory action design approach. (In the break I asked her about the meaning of 'action' in her approach and she explained that even the people in her team have different interpretations of the meaning of the approach. She was not familiar with participatory design without the word 'action'. )
During her talk she gave an example of how they had an early success with their research. They worked with a housing association which provided living space mostly for people over 60years. They usually lived in 1 bed flats. When speaking to the residents, they found that the majority would love to do some gardening. There was a communal garden, but it consisted only of plain lawn and shrubs. The team of researchers helped the residents to organise themselves in order to talk to the housing association and to apply for a grant (for seeds etc) and now the residents can decide how to develop the garden, plant flowers, vegetables and look after it.
Professor Maslin-Prothero pointed out that research findings show how important neighbourhood becomes in later life and that cultural requirements play an important role. For the latter she gave the example of people who have traveled around the world and some who stayed in only one place their whole life.

Another extremely interesting talk was by Steve GoldenSmith. He presented his case how he fights for prevention of ill-health or disability of the older population in Buckinghamshire. He described the problem of the increasing number of older people but less funding for social services overall. At the moment projects only get funding when they can show evidence and with "prevention" it is harder to proof the success. With some cynicsm he talked about a couple of projects where government had a top to bottom, one size fits all approach, which were ineffective because they didn't consider the individuals circumstances or made a distinction between a home resident or living independently at home. According to him our life expectancy is reduced by 7 years when we get into a care home.
He also talked about the government policy for 2010 where they will introduce SDS (self-directed service). Which means rather an official assessing the individual's situation of need of care and then to ensure that services are in place, the official will assess the individuals needs and provide them with cash, so the individual can make their own choices about which service to use.
The idea behind is to reduce cost (from the council's point of view) and to create more competition in the social services market. Obviously, the decision process will now lay with the individual or the individual's family, where Steven also sees an issue with the decision burden (the audience was also very skeptical about SDS). He stated however, that this policy will be implemented despite concerns since government needs to save money.

Audience reaction to SDS was that all charities and social service will need to work more closely together, to support the individuals and to provide them with the choices so they can make an informed decision.

My gut reaction to this is that recommendations / word of mouth / reports on other people's experience in similar situation will be getting more important. The Internet is known for a place where people can exchange opinions. This could be the place where someone who is Internet savvy can get information on several services and compare the choices. However, it will still not help the person who might have the feeling that they have made the wrong choice and who run out of time to correct it.