31 Jul Looking back on Ageing Well Torbay – helping lonely and isolated over fifties

The launch of Ageing Well Torbay, at its very first Ageing Well Festival, October 2015, at The Redcliffe Hotel, Paignton

Ten years is a long time in anyone’s reckoning, but when you are living it, time flies.

Torbay Communities is beginning a whole year of 10th Anniversary celebrations this month to mark its launch in July 2014, and it is a good time to reflect on the journey we have taken down the years.

Projects and people have come and gone, but not before making their mark, and there have been some remarkable highlights to look back on that have helped make our communities in the Bay stronger and more resilient.

Within a few months of our launch, we were told that our bid to bring more than £6,000,000 of Lottery funding into the Bay had been successful, and Ageing Well Torbay (AWT) was born.

AWT’s aims were relatively simple – to work with anyone over the age of 50 to ensure they were living their best lives and no one became vulnerable through loneliness and isolation.

The aim might have been relatively simple, but how to achieve it in an ageing population that contained way above the national average of over 50-year-olds was far from simple.

We quickly recognised that we had been selected to run one of 14 ageing well/ageing better projects around the country because of the complexities and vulnerability of our ageing population.

We knew we had more older people than most areas of the country. That coupled with Torbay’s topography (it is very hilly) and its appeal as a home to people who had enjoyed holidays here when they were younger and healthier, meant we had a proverbial mountain to climb.

Undaunted, we set about finding those vulnerable people – those who lived on those hills, those who were cut off through no longer being able to drive and not having a bus service, those whose mobility had been compromised in later life and those who were involuntarily alone and through no fault of their own were at risk of becoming isolated.

Unusually, we were given more or less free rein to try out new ideas, without fear of failure, something that is called test and learn. Or put another way, try something; if it works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t move on.

For anything to be successful we needed to work with and alongside other voluntary and charitable organisations across the Bay, pooling our resources and expertise, which is something that has been a core value and principle since inception.

Our Community Builders multiplied to cover communities across the Bay, and working with partners, we adopted social prescribing  – something that is best summed up by The Kings Fund, who describe it thus:

‘Social prescribing, sometimes referred to as community referral, is a means of enabling GPs, nurses and other primary care professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services.

‘Recognising that people’s health is determined primarily by a range of social, economic and environmental factors, social prescribing seeks to address people’s needs in a holistic way. It also aims to support individuals to take greater control of their own health.

‘Social prescribing schemes can involve a variety of activities which are typically provided by voluntary and community sector organisations. Examples include volunteering, arts activities, group learning, gardening, befriending, cookery, healthy eating advice and a range of sports.’

Without blowing our own trumpet too loudly, because there were some things that did not work, overall, we were able to boast (backed up by independent research by the University of Plymouth) a 17% fall in the cost to health and social care for the people we worked equating to an average saving of £458 per person per year to the statutory secondary care health and social services.1

Self-reported visits to GPs dropped by 32%, and loneliness rates dropped by 46% across all the measures we used. Furthermore, 59% of people reported improvements in their mental wellbeing.

Result.

At the same time as we ran AWT, from 2015 until 2022 (because although it was a six-year project, COVID meant that it was extended by one year), we also hosted numerous other projects that have changed the lives of people across the Bay making our communities stronger and more resilient as a result

More on those next week.