Britain’s elderly – lonelier than ever. Where do they all belong?

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elderly, isolation, loneliness, lonely, older adults, public health issue

Britain’s elderly – lonelier than ever. Where do they all belong?

Well over one million elderly people in the UK describe themselves as lonely often or all of the time, and many more consider their pet, or even the television, to be their most important form of company.

Age UK said that the findings from their latest loneliness survey revealed a significant increase in self-reported social isolation, with 10 per cent of people describing themselves as often or always lonely. This represents an increase of nearly 300,000 on last year’s survey.

The survey, conducted this month, consulted more than 2,000 people over the age of 65, of whom there are nearly 11 million in the UK.

Two in every five respondents said their main form of company was either their pet or the television. Nationally, this would be the equivalent of 4.3m people.

Loneliness has been identified as a key public health problem in recent years, as more people become cut off from society as they retire from work and lose their independence through disability.

Recent research in the US suggests that being lonely carried twice the health risk of obesity, with people who reported loneliness 14 per cent more likely than average to die in the course of the six-month study.

The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, highlighted loneliness in a speech last year, calling the plight of the “chronically lonely” a “national shame”. He said it was a problem which “in our busy lives we have utterly failed to confront as a society”.

However, Age UK’s director Caroline Abrahams said that funding cuts, which were brought in by the Coalition, were forcing many of the local services which help elderly people stay connected, such as lunch clubs, to close – increasing the work that the voluntary sector had to do.

“We know how devastating loneliness can be for older people and these figures are another reminder of the scale of the issue,” she said.

Kate Jopling, director for the Campaign to End Loneliness, added: “It should be a grave concern to health and social care managers that so many older people are now severely lonely. The evidence is clear that loneliness leads to avoidable ill health.

“If we fail to take this public health issue seriously now we may end up pushing already stretched services to breaking point.”

Elderly patients win right to sue if medical treatment is denied because of age

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abuse, age, discrimination, elderly, stroke

Elderly patients win right to sue if medical treatment is denied because of age

Elderly patients are to receive legal protection against being denied medical treatment simply because of their advanced years, ministers will announce today.

A ban against age discrimination in public services, such as health and social care, is to come into force in October. It will outlaw doctors, care home staff and hospital managers from deciding on levels of care on any grounds other than medical need.

Patients or relatives who believe they have been discriminated against because of their age or are being regarded as a lower priority than younger people with the same condition will able to sue health managers.

Nurses and carers will also face a legal obligation to treat older people with respect and dignity.

The moves follow years of reports of treatment being rationed by age – for instance with younger patients placed nearer the front of the queue for heart surgery – and accounts of elderly patients receiving sub-standard care.

Age discrimination in the workplace is already illegal and ministers have been deliberating for more than a year on whether the ban should be extended to the provision of services. As the timetable slipped, fears grew among campaigners for the elderly that the Government might be having second thoughts.

Ministers have dropped plans to outlaw companies and banks from charging older customers higher prices for products such as travel insurance, but are to implement the bulk of their initial proposals.

Doctors and hospital chiefs are formally advised only to allocate treatment on the basis of medical need and not age.

But studies suggest they are not always abiding by the instruction. Three years ago a think-tank concluded that older people had “differential access to services” – they were less likely than younger people to be referred to intensive care after a serious accident and waited longer in casualty departments. It also found they were not receiving equivalent treatment for conditions such as strokes and heart disease.

Paul Burstow, the Care Minister, will say today: “We know that older people are not always treated with the dignity and respect they deserve because of ageist attitudes – this will not be tolerated. Our population is ageing as more of us live longer. The challenge for the NHS is to look beyond a person’s date of birth and meet the needs of older people as individuals.”

Michelle Mitchell, of Age UK, said: “Discrimination based on your date of birth is as indefensible in 21st-century Britain as prejudice on the basis of race, gender, disability or sexual orientation.

“We hope the new law which will apply to the NHS, social care and other services will prevent older people being denied proper treatment because of their age. It sends a clear message to service providers that discrimination law will in future also protect older people.”

More:

Theresa May announces blanket ban on age discrimination of patients

Elderly struck by ‘epidemic’ of body image and eating disorders

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age, anxiety, Body Image, Depression, Eating Disorders, elderly, Self-esteem

Elderly struck by ‘epidemic’ of body image and eating disorders

A growing number of older British people – including those in their 70s and 80s – are suffering from low self-esteem and anxieties relating to body image.

Interviewed for the Observer Magazine this weekend, Professor Nichola Rumsey, co-director of the University of the West of England’s centre for appearance research, suggests that “as adults, 90% of British women feel body-image anxiety”.

She said: “It doesn’t wane – many women in their 80s are still anxious about the way their bodies look, which can even affect their treatment in hospital when their health choices are influenced by aesthetics.”

Popular opinion suggests that body image-related anxiety is a young person’s problem, with recent reports focusing on the age (five years old) at which we are now vulnerable to pressures to conform to an expected ideal. Constant media coverage of the debate on teenagers and their negative relationship with their bodies has served to reinforce the message that it is predominantly young people who suffer such anxieties.

However, Rumsey’s studies in Bristol counterbalance this with evidence that these anxieties do not dissipate as the years pass, but merely evolve into different types of concerns about appearance and how we are seen by others.

“We have conducted a study of about 1,200 people, which confirms that appearance-related anxieties persist well into later adulthood,” Rumsey said. “At an age where most healthcare professionals focus on controlling pain and body functionality, many patients feel the way they look is as much of a concern, but isn’t a legitimate topic of conversation.

“It can cause substantial distress to look in the mirror and see an ageing body, especially if they have very visible conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis or an obvious skin condition, for example, yet in the UK we can be very dismissive of what is often construed as vanity. GPs are not trained to deal with the psychological impact of these anxieties, which can have a significant influence on overall wellbeing.”

Even those who are relatively fit and healthy in later years struggled with the idea that they no longer conformed to a youthful ideal, said Rumsey, who recently co-wrote The Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Appearance. “It is a myth that older people don’t care what they look like: the ‘normal’ signs of ageing can prove very depressing and many people find it hard to see themselves in a positive light when they see a wrinkled face and a sagging body looking back in the mirror. We are now at a point where there is a social stigma around the effects of the natural ageing process, and this can lead to very low self-esteem and the classic signs of body dysmorphic disorder.”

These observations are echoed by the increasing number of body image-related cases in older people being seen by Dr Alex Yellowlees, medical director and a consultant psychiatrist at the Glasgow Priory Clinic, who is witnessing “an epidemic of self-consciousness. We are suffering from a collective body dissatisfaction, which is a contagion in our society, and we must acknowledge that it affects all walks of society, young and old.

“It was once the case that we were happy to coast into retirement and relax in our old age, but now even in these later stages of life I am seeing people who are preoccupied with shape, weight and looks in a way that was once the domain of younger people who had yet to find their path or identity in life.”

Yellowlees reports an alarming rise in older patients with eating disorders, as all sectors of society strive to achieve what he calls “an unrealistic physical ideal”.

“Today everybody is acutely aware of how they look, and our appearance has become a currency we trade on,” he said. “That means we value old people less because they don’t fit the currency of ‘youth’. This in turn leads to a lack of self-esteem in older people, because they don’t feel valued by a culture that can’t get past superficial image. Appearance is a very fragile currency to trade in because a civilised culture interacts on more sophisticated values such as character, behaviour and language.”

In a culture where increasing value is placed on our appearance, Rumsey voices concerns that we must look beyond the superficial. “Older people are the wise ones we have always looked to for their experience and knowledge, and if they are preoccupied with appearance anxieties this becomes the norm for future generations.”

Elderly People In Britain Lonelier Than In Other European Countries, Study Finds

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elderly, isolation, loneliness

Elderly People In Britain Lonelier Than In Other European Countries, Study Finds

Elderly people in Britain are lonelier and poorer that those in similar European countries, international research suggests.

They are also more concerned about age discrimination than some of their European neighbours and feel more negative towards young people, a Demos report has found.

More over-65s in this country suffer life-limiting illnesses than in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, it showed.

The UK was graded third among the four countries in its overall performance across a range of areas considered in the report prepared for older people’s charity WRVS.

One reason for the sense of solitude felt by Britain’s elderly may be long-term underinvestment by local authorities in services that reduce isolation and loneliness, it was argued.

The country’s poor score in elderly people’s health might reflect particularly unhealthy lifestyles in the UK, with higher rates of alcohol consumption and obesity than in the other three countries, the Ageing Across Europe report suggested.

By contrast, in Sweden, where older people are the healthiest of those across the four countries, public policy focuses on improving health earlier on in life to ensure a healthier old age.

Of the four countries, Britain’s over-65s were found to face the highest chance of living in poverty, with a fifth of pensioners at risk in 2010, compared to only six per cent of pensioners at risk of poverty in the Netherlands.

Older women in the UK were more concerned about age discrimination than older men, the study found.

WRVS said the findings should act as a wake-up call.  Chief executive David McCullough said: “The treatment of older people in this country needs to be addressed and we must learn from our EU partners.

“They have proved it is possible to tackle some of these issues by taking advantage of volunteers to provide older people with more social contact and better links to their communities.

“This, in turn, will have a knock-on beneficial impact on their health.”

The study recommended more volunteering to provide peer support to older people and boost their social life, and annual government reports on Britain’s older population measuring progress against other European Union countries.

The UK should also explore what else can be done to encourage intergenerational mingling, it suggested.

The Government described loneliness as one of society’s biggest challenges.

Care Services Minister Paul Burstow said: “Lack of day-to-day contact can have a huge impact on people’s health.

“The Government is working with the Campaign to End Loneliness to raise awareness about how important even a simple phone call or visit can be to someone’s health.

“We will be setting out in our care and support White Paper how we will work with the voluntary sector, businesses, local communities and others to put tackling loneliness on the agenda.”

How joggers can help the housebound

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elderly, Exercise, Housebound, stroke

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/mar/04/good-gym-exercise-community-work

Every Thursday evening, whatever the weather, Harriet Cawley runs two-and-a-half miles from Shoreditch, east London, to the home of her coach, Michael Mulcahy. Cawley regularly undertakes half-marathons but this is no ordinary training session. Mulcahy is a house-bound widower who enjoys receiving a London Evening Standard from Cawley and having a chat for half-an-hour. After which, Cawley runs home again.

Cawley is a member of the Good Gym, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages people to combine their exercise regime with a spot of social care, matching busy workers with elderly “coaches”, who receive a daily paper or other modest delivery and, in turn, provide an incentive for their weekly visitors to keep on running. Set up two-and-a-half years ago, the Good Gym is this year expanding across all Olympic boroughs, part-funded by the Olympic Park Legacy Company.

The Good Gym was the brainchild of Ivo Gormley, 29, who discovered that combining a weekly run with a visit to a housebound friend of the family was just the motivation he needed to keep him exercising; it helped that his elderly friend was a former boxer who could offer training tips. As Gormley did his prescribed situps, he thought about how best to link up a series of very modern disconnects: how few people have the time or energy to volunteer and yet use gyms to burn off excess energy; and how little dialogue there is between working people and the elderly, particularly in densely populated urban communities.

“Gyms are this ridiculous invention,” says Gormley. “People have got too much energy and go to these weird places where they get purged of it by machines. I thought we could channel the energy from people’s exercise into something more productive.”

Through working with the NHS, charities and local community centres, including The Sundial Centre in Bethnal Green and Toynbee Hall, the Good Gym matches runners with an individual coach – a housebound elderly person who would like a regular visitor. They are encouraged to take a newspaper or a modest gift to the value of £1.

There are also monthly group runs around east London, to perform useful activities along the way. So far Good Gym members have distributed flyers for a local hospice, tidied up community gardens and hauled compost on to a school roof. Two runners are now being sought for a somewhat unusual task: taking donkeys from Stepney City Farm for a trot. (The donkeys need the exercise to keep their hooves down; donkey handling training will be provided.)

Cawley, 38, a costume stylist, heard about the Good Gym through Twitter. “It seemed such a brilliant idea,” she says. It took four months for her to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau (the Good Gym now uses a company to speed up this process and claims it takes just a couple of weeks), then she was assigned Mulcahy to run to, based on the distance she requested.

Having a break in her running works well from a training point of view: she does a speed run to Mulcahy’s house, rests there, then a does a more gentle, warm-down jog on the way home. Cawley is from Stockport and has no grandparents in London, so enjoys chatting to her elderly coach – “someone I would never have met,” she says. While the Good Gym advises runners to stay for about 10 minutes, Cawley sometimes chats to Mulcahy for an hour. Although he has family, and regular visits from professional carers, Cawley thinks he enjoys a visit from someone who does not worry like relatives and is not there out of professional duty. She didn’t really know what he made of “this random person turning up and chatting to him” until she told him she was going away on holiday. “He said: ‘I’ll really miss you.'”

Terry Duncan, 67, a retired printer from Stepney, uses an electric wheelchair after a stroke. He is regularly visited by Sally, another Good Gym member. “It’s lovely. I look forward to her coming,” he says. He played football when he was younger, but is not sure how much use he is as a coach. “I don’t coach her,” he says. What about a mid-run cup of tea? “She normally has a glass of water. She’s a bit hot and sweaty but sits down and has a chat. We’ve become good friends.”

Duncan has recommended the Good Gym to several immobile neighbours, but says they are “a bit dubious about strangers coming into their house”. Despite these fears, the Good Gym is expanding, with interest in Edinburgh and a Good Gym run in Chicago. Most significant this year will be its Olympics expansion. As organisers hope the Games will leave a more enduring legacy in east London, Gormley wants his enterprise to become a social norm for the young professionals moving into the new housing around the Olympic Park. “It’s an amazing opportunity to shape the culture of a new area,” he says. “And link it to the existing community.”