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Posts Tagged ‘slef-sufficiency’

The quality and the quantity of residential and amusement services offered to elderly people is growing fast in northern European countries. This is due to an increased demand that follows medical progresses and consequently longer life expectation.

A few years ago, people over 60, did not have a lot of choices about how to go through this life phase: to find accommodation in the family; to stay independent when possible; in a retirement home; or in a nursing home if not self-sufficient. Today’s elderly people became a very interesting target for advertisement, for travels, for fashion and also for proposals of new and innovative residential concepts.

Elderly people are today more fit and independent than the ones of 10 or 20 years ago. If I think to my grandparents and compare them to my parents, that are today about the same age, I can see a big difference in physical and mental agility.

People at 60 or 70 years old, unlike the recent past, are still young and want to spend their life in as much a self-sufficient and independent way as possible so they can enjoy life. The availability of an efficient means of transport to reach cultural and sporting events is an important factor to keeping a good quality level of life.

In this article, I bring the experience of German speaking countries, about which I have a privileged point of observation for cultural reasons and with whom I entertain intense professional relations. Germany, Austria and Switzerland, in fact have always given a lot of attention to providing advanced and innovative public and private social services.

A recent opinion poll made in Germany, ordered by a bank, investor in the residential construction field, found that one German in every three would like to spend the third age with people his own age.

To fulfill the increasing demand from the newly elderly, many German public institutions offer service housing, This is the opportunity to rent or buy a small apartment in residential complexes furnished with shared environments which provide opportunity for performing indoor sport activities or social and cultural interactions. Elderly people can then live independently and take care of themselves, but when necessary they can get medical and nursing assistance.

Another solution that is having wide success at this moment in Germany, is shared housing (Wohngemeinschaft). In these apartments, elderly people live together with friends and relatives of the same age. The concept reminds, and maybe derives from student housing and represents for that reason an interesting analogy, almost a coming back to the youth years of the guests, now elderly.

The apartments offer to each resident their own private space of which they are responsible, but also shared spaces like the community center, the terrace or the garden. Residents take care of each other, implementing a first level of supportive assistance.

Olga (Oldies leben gemeinsam aktiv – elderly people who live actively together) created in Nuremberg, has recently been awarded by the German State, for the high quality of life that they offer to the residents. Olga is a shared housing concept inhabited by 11 ladies between 58 and 63 years old. Each resident has the use of a private one room apartment and can use different shared environments. An interesting initiative of this community was the education training that the residents attended, to learn to keep themselves independent as long as possible, limiting or delaying to incur the expenses of professional help.

This new concept of cohabitation, allows the residents to keep their independence and autonomy but at the same time to have the social and economical advantages of cohabitation. Moreover, the active life of the resident increases the friendship circle and the number of people who interact with the elderly who can provide help in case of necessity.

There are of course also some weak points. In the case of needing professional help 24h a day, the residents in cohabitation have to sustain costs noticeably higher than the shared nursing assistance offered by a traditional retirement home.

Another critical point is finding suitable residential structures. Moreover, since this concept is moving in its first steps, it is not always easy to find another person interested in cohabitation especially in small villages.

Recent studies evidenced unequivocally that cohabitation projects for elderly people, increase appreciatively the quality of life and at the same time reduce or delay the needs of professional support and hospitalization.

The cohabitation residences allow the elderly to live with dignity and an abundance of life.

In order that this quality of life concept will be widely followed assistential authorities, investors, families of elderly people and elderly people themselves, must go through a path of self-critique, experimenting and cultural renewal, having the courage to embrace new creative and innovative initiatives.