Campaign to End Loneliness launches today

The Campaign to End Loneliness launches today, 1 February 2011. The campaign, a collaborative effort between Independent Age, Age UK Oxfordshire, Counsel and Care, and WRVS and funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, aims to fight loneliness and isolation in older people.

Although research suggests that loneliness is a greater threat to health than obesity, and as bad as lifelong smoking, fewer than 1 in 5 people have ever seen or heard information about loneliness as a health risk, and fewer than 1 in 3 who work in health and social care professions have.

The campaign aims to raise awareness of the risks of loneliness and to make sure they are treated as a serious risk to public health.

A report, Safeguarding the Convoy, is also published today to accompany the campaign, and calls for others to join and take action to end loneliness in order to future proof forthcoming generations of older people against it.

Visit http://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org.uk/ for more information or to download a copy of the report.

The potential battle over meals on wheels

by Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications for Independent Age

By coincidence, I heard this week from the chief exec of the organisation that invented meals on wheels and, the next day, from a council that has just scrapped them. WRVS is one of those charities that emerged from government just before the second world war and is now seem as something of a national institution. Its impressive chief executive, Lynne Berry, is busily completing the transformation of the organisation from a vast conglomerate of disparate services to a more focused, directed body. But they still deliver millions of meals on wheels to elderly people each year.

Sue Warr is an (also impressive) manager in Dorset County Council, tackling social exclusion among older people. Dorset has a lot of older people: over 700,000 - well over one quarter of its population (apparently in Christchurch there is a saying that people retire to Christchurch to die and then forget what they came for). Only 189 of them use meals on wheels so the council has a new ‘access to food and nutrition’ project that aims to help more people. Those currently getting meals on wheels will get individual help to identify other ways of getting food and meals.

Dorset clearly takes older people’s issues seriously and Sue described some brilliant work to prevent and deal with social exclusion and loneliness among older people. So Dorset may well be right to think that there are better ways of providing food and nutrition to older people in the county. But I can’t help wondering whether at least some of the 189 people getting meals on wheels were actually very happy with what they were getting and wanted it to continue. It would be reassuring to know that they are happy with the new arrangements. More worryingly, will we see other councils scrapping services such as these to save money, without going to quite the lengths of Dorset to see that the existing service users get a good alternative?