How can we create communities that are both carer friendly and age-friendly?
This week is Carers Week, an annual opportunity to highlight the challenges faced by carers and the contributions that they make, writes our Head of Communities Charlotte Lewis.
This year’s theme is Building Carer Friendly Communities - showcasing the difference communities can make when they recognise carers, understand their needs and take practical action to support them.
When I heard about this year’s theme in the lead up to Carers Week, my ears immediately pricked up. As someone who spends their working life trying to create more age-friendly communities across the country, this theme caused me to reflect on how age-friendly communities could become carer friendly, and vice versa.
Ageing and caring
First and foremost, we can’t think of carers and older people as distinct. People aged 55-64 are the age group who are most likely to be caring. And those aged 65 and over are providing the highest number of hours of care, with almost one in five of carers in this age group caring for 50 or more hours per week.
Caring when you are older can come with unique challenges. Older carers who are caring for people younger than them, like a child, are often concerned about whether their care needs will be met if they are no longer able to provide that care.
Older carers can also face more practical barriers. Carers allowance stops after people start to receive their state pension despite those caring responsibilities not changing. This can be particularly challenging for people who have had to reduce hours or stop work altogether to manage their caring responsibilities and so haven’t built up the private pension they may need to get by.
Age-friendly and carer friendly communities
For carers, living in a community where your needs and contributions are understood and supported can make a real difference to your life. But carers in the 55-64 age group are most likely to say that they are unable to get the support they needed from essential shops (25%) and most likely to say they are unable to take part in local groups or activities (28%).
A lot of the elements of a community that can make it carer friendly can also make it age-friendly. In 2007 the World Health Organisation developed it’s Eight Domains which highlight the eight aspects of community life that can make a difference people’s ability to age well in the community. And this year Carers UK have published their blueprint for carer friendly communities, highlighting six key aspects.
There are some notable overlaps between these two different frameworks.
Being able to get the information you need on what’s available in your community, whether that’s support services or social opportunities, is something highlighted by both carers and older people as vital. Particularly important is having a single point of access to information and services, especially health services, whether those are services for you or for those you care for.
Being able to access flexible work is as important to older workers as it is working carers. This might enable flexibility around caring responsibilities but equally can help workers manage health conditions or simply working fewer hours if that is something people can do and want to do in later life.
Recent research from Carers UK showed that in the community, pharmacies were considered to be the most carer friendly organisation/service, with public transport and services like banking being the least. For many of the communities we work with you could replace the word “carer” with “age” and these findings would also ring true.
But we’ve certainly seen instances where well running public transport and banking services are making the community more, rather than less age-friendly. When local bus providers receive age-friendly training to better understand the needs of their older customers, we’ve seen changes to the way staff support customers or even drive their buses. When banks still have a physical presence on the high street not only can they provide a non-digital alternative, but also a vital social touchpoint, especially for people who may be living alone.
What can be done?
Across the UK Network of Age-friendly Communities people are working to make their communities both age and carer friendly. In Norfolk, carers organisation, Carers Voice Norfolk and Waveney, have joined the Age-friendly Breckland steering group as a core member. They’ve been working collaboratively at local events to promote their carers handbook to older people who may not even realise they are a carer.
In Age-friendly Middlesborough, this week their age-friendly coffee morning has focused on carers, encouraging conversations about caring as well as promoting local support.
And vice versa, in Ceredigion their local carers magazine has been promoting their age-friendly forum, ensuring that older carers have a voice in shaping the work to make their place more age-friendly.
At a local level there can be challenges to managing the requirements of what makes a community age-friendly and carer friendly, alongside dementia-friendly, child-friendly and many other worthwhile programmes. But in many cases the changes that are needed to ensure communities are accessible to all are similar, as are the people and organisations who can make those changes.
This Carers Week at the Centre for Ageing Better, we invited Carers UK to present at our weekly UK Network of Age-friendly Communities Peer Call. The discussion gave us all much food for thought and has certainly motivated me to seek out more opportunities to highlight the needs of older carers in our communities programme, as we work towards creating a more friendly society for everyone.