Good week/bad week

Have this week’s events brought good news or bad for older people?

By Rebecca Law, Media and PR Officer

This was a bad week in the bus world according to an update from the Campaign for Better Transport. Tens of thousands of pensioners could be left without transport as 72% of local authorities target buses as a means of making savings. The cuts mean that hundreds of routes are being axed and the number of services slashed.

The news will be a real blow for thousands of older people, who, without their own transport are reliant on the bus network. It’s particularly bad news for those in rural areas where links are already poor. Access to public transport allows older people to continue leading active lives and to stay linked with their local community, when they might otherwise struggle to get out and about. While we accept that councils have to save money, we believe, with moves like this, they are targeting the wrong things. Cutting bus routes would have the worst impact on those who need them most and will simply leave a greater number of older people cut off.

National and local government needs to be much more joined up. It makes no sense for central government to require councils to give all pensioners a free bus pass, while at the same time allowing them to withdraw subsidies from the very routes that the most isolated older people will be using.

It’s a good week for all the 90-year olds out there who happen to have adopted a Stone Age diet since their thirties. According to Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology, you can halt the ageing process for the next few years and enter a stage of “coasting” where the body won’t face any new problems beyond those already present. Sounds good – if a little like a Gulliver’s Travels narrative plot. But other experts remain sceptical claiming that “Professor Rose [has] dismissed solid evidence into the causes of ageing...it is misleading to hold out the hope that something remarkable happens to arrest ageing very late in life...” So, perhaps for now, the jury’s out, but, as they say, the proof is in the pudding, so for those who would like to give it a go for themselves, the full article is here: http://t.co/xposrzW

Good to grumble?

Today's story on people failing to act on the early signs of rheumatoid arthritis is sadly unsurprising. Pain experienced when we are young is rarely accepted as something ‘normal’, but there is a worrying tendency for some older people to assume that a degree of pain is an inevitable part of the ageing process. This, however, is simply not the case.

In our experience as an older people’s charity we have come across a “mustn’t grumble” attitude among a number of those we support, forcing us to ask why it is sometimes considered acceptable to suffer? Does this acceptance come as a result of negative attitudes towards ageing in our society, and a feeling that older age automatically means death and decline? And what are the consequences?

Over half of our beneficiaries endure pain on a daily basis, which has an inevitable impact on their quality of life. It is worth considering whether a proportion of the vast numbers of older people currently failing to claim their benefits and entitlements, view their own disability as a natural limitation accompanying older age, and not something which entitles them to any help.

There is a broad expectation that the generation of baby boomers will expect more from their later years. But in order for this to happen they must not only challenge negative attitudes about the type of life they can expect to lead, but the type of life they will be able to lead. We must address our current versions of what is natural and what is not.