By Sally Nichols, Riverside’s Assistant Director of Operations (Housing & Care)

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
George Bernard Shaw

Today, we mark International Older Persons Day in which the theme is about the aspirations, well-being and rights of older people.

I can’t speak on behalf of older people across the world. However, having worked in supported and older people’s housing for the past 30 years I do know a bit about the importance of well-being.

Over the years I have seen how the well-being of a person impacts on almost every aspect of their life from health and happiness to personality, relationships and longevity.

However, isolation in older people is one the major contributing factors to declining health.

And when a person feels well, I know it often contributes to a person staying active for longer, and remaining healthier and happier. And this in turns impacts on the relationships and aspirations of a person and their social habits.

Being able to improve a persons’ well-being can have a transformational impact on their life.

However, improving a person’s well-being also has important societal benefits including:

• reductions in GP appointments and prescriptions
• reductions in hospital admissions
• reductions in admission to residential care homes where people require more intensive 24-hour care.

This helps to reduce the pressure on those services which often struggle with too much demand.

Importantly it also helps to reduce government spending.

At a time when we have an ageing population, with 22 million people aged over 50 in England, this is very important right now. And it will become even more important in the years to come with this demographic expected to increase by almost a fifth (19%) over the next 20 years.

One of the great things about working for a national care and support provider like Riverside is that the scale of our operations makes it easier to see the bigger picture.

Riverside has 5,000 customers living in more than 190 retirement living services across 98 local authority areas.

This gives us the opportunity to help a large cross-section of society and care for people from a diverse range of needs.

Show how do we help improve and maintain well-being?

Riverside provide different types of housing and services for older people including retirement living and extra care housing, where people can receive 24/7 care if required. Our services are aimed at people aged 55+ who can live independently. In extra care we have teams of dedicated carers whom support people to live well in their home.

While the care needs, social needs and personality of every single person is different, Riverside carers work with customers to help them to live as independently and freely as possible.

Unfortunately, some older people tend to become less physically active, less mentally active and less sociable the older they become. Our services are designed to address some of these issues by providing diverse programme of activities across our services which means people stay physically and mentally active for longer.

This results in customers being offered the opportunity to design and take part in a wide variety of activities ranging from aromatherapy to Zumba and arts and crafts to karaoke, podcasting, blogging, photography, archery, as well as more traditional activities such as dancing, walking, gardening, flower arranging, bowling and board games.

The key is that Riverside’s teams listen to and work with customers to provide a broad programme of activities that is tailored towards what they need and want.

So, no programme of activities is the same in any Riverside services.

The dedication to providing activities means that one of our larger Extra Care schemes hosts more than 3,000 events and activities a year.

Some customers prefer to take part in less activities and this is always respected.

But where possible we encourage customers to remain active and community-facing, ensuring life is not only safe and supportive, but also active, meaningful, and fulfilling.

This year to mark older persons day on 1^st October we are organising events across all of our retirement living and extra care services with the aim of bringing customers together for joyful experiences which encourage new connections, shared laughter, and help to reduce loneliness and isolation by creating meaningful moments.

While well-being, activity, connections and laughter really matters to our customers and our staff, I believe this really matters to everyone.

Wherever you are today I’d like you to think about connecting with the older people in your life and how you can support their well-being.

While spending anytime with friends and family is important, are there different activities you can do with older people in your life?

Are there new or old activities you can do together which will create new experiences and meaningful moments?

And while this is particularly significant today, how you’ll continue to connect with older people in the weeks, months and years ahead is even more important.

For our older people, and indeed all of us, well-being is a journey not a destination.

We can all play a role in helping with this.

Let’s keep supporting our older people on that journey, and celebrate all older people.