Rural Elderly

This story provides interesting food for thought in the context of rural communities with their skewed demography towards older people. Do we need some intergenerational tonic of this sort? It tells us:

Care homes should be used to provide student accommodation and nurseries in an effort to combat “inter-generational apartheid”, according to a new report.

The study by think tank, United for All Ages, warns that older people are becoming increasingly “ghettoised” and lonely in care homes, and rarely talk to younger people apart from family members.

It claims that once family interaction is ruled out, the average Briton has 56 per cent less interaction with other generations than would be expected if there was no social segregation.

To help fight the growing “everyday ageism” within society, the report suggests a range of measures including home-share schemes where younger people live with older people and help them with daily activities  in return for reduced rent.

It also suggests universities and schools should be opened up for older people’s programmes and that regular street parties should be held to encourage more mixing of the generations.

Home sharing schemes are becoming increasingly popular in Europe, as young people look for ways to be able to afford tuition fees and increasingly high rents in cities. But these have yet to take off in the UK.

“Britain is increasingly divided by age and by generation,” said Stephen Burke, director of United for All Ages.

“Ending age apartheid and promoting social integration between generations can help build communities and a country for all ages, where we are united not divided. In Brexit Britain, that is an ambition worth pursuing in 2017.

This is a really serious issue and one which I think will impact significantly on vulnerable elderly people in rural communities.

Delays in implementing the government’s cap on care costs could leave older people unable to cope with unlimited expenses, according to parliament’s spending watchdog.

The public accounts committee has called for ministers to draw up an urgent and clear timetable for implementing the cap in a report released on Wednesday.

The MPs warned that without a cap, cuts in local government finance could lead to “cost shunting”, with people forced to pay extra for their requirements or councils cutting other services.

The report has been released just weeks after David Cameron was criticised for protesting about cuts to public services suggested by his own Tory council.

The Conservative leader of Oxfordshire county council told the prime minister the council was facing new financial pressures because functions including social care had been transferred to local government.

Very good report this. I had the opportunity to offer some perspectives to Martyn Lewis on AgeUk radio last week in a pre-recorded discussion before it was launched. It got a lot of air time on national radio on Monday. I would commend it to you as a great summary of the issues. The accompanying press release tells us:

Age UK has launched a new campaign to raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities faced by older people living in rural communities in England. We want all levels of government to take steps to make the whole country a place where older people can thrive.

Living in the countryside as an older person certainly has its advantages. Yet while the ‘rural idyll’ holds true for some people, with fewer people and larger distances between towns and villages, living in rural England can present unique challenges for older people.

This really powerful article sets out graphically the challenges facing the isolated elderly – clearly a far bigger proportion of the population and more acutely isolated in many rural communities.

A flurry of research has demonstrated that lonely people face serious health risks. Some reports have even suggested that being lonely is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day; others that it can increase the risk of dementia. Lauder agrees: “My research has shown that those who are lonely are more likely to smoke and be obese,” he says. “US researchers have shown that those who are lonely are less likely to take regular exercise. If you are lonely you are more likely to have a heart attack, and if you experience a heart attack when you are lonely, you are less likely to survive it. You are double or triple as likely to die. But although there is more research, this hasn’t translated into policy.”

One reason for this may be because loneliness is such a complex issue. For a start, it is subjective, and not necessarily linked to physical isolation: “You could have 10 relatives who live near you,” says Lauder, “but you could still be lonely.”

To help effectively, charities must distinguish between emotional loneliness – when you miss one person, a partner or friend after a bereavement, for instance – and social loneliness, when you no longer feel part of the group, says Ferguson. Cacioppo makes further divisions into situational loneliness – when circumstances such as family or health problems stop you feeling connected to others – and chronic loneliness, when feelings of loneliness “become uncoupled from the situations that aroused them”.

You can look at the interesting map associated with this story which confirms people live longer in rural England. However is that because they are more affluent when they choose to move there rather than because of anything specific in the make up of the countryside? We also all know when the rurally dispersed elderly get past 80 they put a big strain on service provision. More work needs to be done about this whole agenda.

“The number of live births to mothers aged 40 and over has more than quadrupled from 6,860 in 1981 to 29,350 in 2011.”

The north east had a 12% higher mortality rate than the rest of the country using the standardised mortality ratio (SMR) calculation.

In contrast, mortality levels were lowest in London and the south east, where they were 7% below the national level.

Manchester was the local authority with the highest SMR, at 32% above the national, while South Cambridgeshire’s was 26% below.

In Wales, Blaenau Gwent had the highest SMR, 29% above the national level, while Monmouthshire had the lowest, at 10% below.

The ONS said the variations were down to socio-economic factors, income differences and health behaviour.

The West Midlands had the highest regional infant mortality rate, with 6.0 deaths per thousand live births, and the south east had the lowest, with 3.5 deaths per thousand live births.

Wales had an infant mortality rate of 3.9 deaths per thousand live births.

The ONS said differences could be explained by the mother’s country of birth, socio-economic status and age.

It calculated the average age of a mother as 29.7 years – unchanged on previous figures.

This article makes interesting reading. It reveals the contradictory appeal of rural settlements. On the one hand it shows the clear attraction of rural places to those seeking to retire. On the other it helps explain why an increasing store of elderly people are making some rural settlements hard to sustain economically in the long term. Having said all that as 65 is the new 40 we shouldn’t worry too much about the active elderly (ie those below 80) moving into some rural places where they offer dynamism and enthusiasm as experienced people with time and volunteering capacity on their hands.

The article also flags up the unfairness of the funding formula for local authorities. Grant allocation concentrates on deprivation not vulnerability and therefore the places which appeal most to rural retirees – those with limited deprivation also have to raise more of their council income through councils tax as they are eligible for fewer grants. Hence the places become still more expensive for people of limited means to live in. Read on to see how the information is set out in more detail in the article itself.

The market town of Skipton, “the gateway to the Dales”, and its surrounding area in Craven, North Yorkshire, is the best place to retire to, according to research by Guardian Money in partnership with credit reference agency Experian.

Despite relatively little sunshine, Skipton scored highly on other indicators, including rainfall, crime, house prices, transport, neighbourliness – and access to glorious countryside.

Experian number-crunched 40 measures that make up “quality of life” as rated by people whose children have left home, with a special emphasis on air quality, crime rate, population density, burglary rates, neighbourliness, good health and life expectancy.

We could only obtain data for local authorities in England.

What does it tell us? That Devon and Dorset will remain firm favourites for years to come – but also that several northern districts beat the south hands down when it comes to quality of life.

None of the big cities came anywhere near the top of the rankings, perhaps confirming the first findings from the government’s National Wellbeing Programme that the happiest people live in remote areas. It ties in with a 2009 survey by Saga, which found the single most important factor older people identify as key for their retirement is access to the countryside.

But the retirement idylls come at a price. Typically, a detached home in one of the top 10 locations, will cost £325,000, with surprisingly little difference between north and south; there’s barely a whisker between the Derbyshire Dales and North Dorset. The two top locations for those with a smaller budget were Torridge in north-east Devon and, the perhaps appropriately named, Eden area of Cumbria.

All come with relatively high council tax, typically around £1,500 for a Band D home, significantly higher than the average £1,304 in London

This article tells us:

“A small Somerset village and an arty Suffolk resort have topped a table for UK life expectancy drawn up by a firm of actuaries, which seems to highlight how many years having an occupational scheme can add to your life.

Although official statistics show that a man born today could expect to live to 78.2 years old and a woman until 82.3 years old, the research by Towers Watson shows members of occupational pension schemes are living much longer. 

It found male retirees in Hinton St George in Somerset and the Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh are both expected to live until they are 88.7 years old, while women in the two towns have a life expectancy of 91.6 years. Frinton-on-Sea, which is at third place in the table, actually has longer life expectancy for women, but shorter for men.

While the ONS figures are based on the whole population, this research was based on a study of 180,000 deaths among 1.5 million members of 51 final salary pension schemes, which would remove the poorest pensioners from the figures. The research looked at life expectancy for those aged 65 after adjusting for differences in pension size and occupational background.”

This is fascinating stuff – I wonder if it is the rural milieu or the occupational pension which can claim primacy in extending the life expectancies of these people? it does make me reflect on yet another downside in terms of our inability to support full pension schemes for people going forward. I wonder how the number of years lived during a recession impacts on life expectancy

According to the report of the Commons Health Committee published this week there is no joined up agenda for supporting the vulnerable elderly. The article explains.

The Government has committed to providing an additional £20 billion a year for social care by 2015, but the MPs say this is “not sufficient to maintain adequate levels of service quality and efficiency”. “Pursuing the ‘salami slicing’ of services, coupled with a failure to improve quality and efficiency through integration, will have very serious consequences for standards in both health and social care,” the report concludes.

Stephen Dorrell, Conservative chairman of the committee, said: “It is impossible to deliver either high quality or efficient services when the patient is passed like a parcel from one part of the system to another, without any serious attempt to look at their needs in the round.

This is a big issue for rural England with its skewed demography, one where local authorities have a major role to play and in my experience an area of policy with very limited sharing of good practice at the local level.