Review of Community Based Older People Day Opportunities Services

Warwickshire County Council is reviewing the current community based Older People Day Opportunities Services that it commissions. The services are provided to people aged 65 years and over within their local community. This can often be in a building based setting such as a day centre.  There are  seven services; Waverley Day Centr; InTouch Home Care;  New Directions Rugby Ltd; Khair in the Community; (Nuneaton Muslim Society)  Satkaar Asian Elders Day Care Services;  Shri Hindu Gujarati Samaj (Anmol) and Sikh Mission Day Centre .

The services support older people and their relatives/carers to access a day service and give them the opportunity to mix with similar aged people.  The services offer activities to help support individuals health and wellbeing and they can also provide an opportunity for carers, family members or friends to have a break from their caring role.

The Council is undertaking this review to find out if the services are meeting the needs of those that are using them and their relatives/carers. This includes finding out whether older people in Warwickshire feel part of their local community and are not isolated.  Loneliness and social isolation is a significant and growing issue for older people in particular. Therefore it is important that this issue is understood and that services are offered to prevent loneliness.

This review will help to identify ways in which to improve the day service offer for older people.  This will include how any future community based Older People Day Opportunities service may assist with

•  Enabling a person over the age of 65 to live independently within their community;
• Offer targeted advice on many aspects of health and wellbeing;
• Offer advice and support on practical daily living;
• Reducing loneliness and social isolation.

167 responses were received for the surveys

The engagement findings reflected the following key themes to explore moving forward;

•  the need to create stronger partnerships with stakeholders;
• work more closely with carers to ensure provision supports carers respite;
• develop more personalised services offering a wide range of activities to meet the varied needs of older people;
• explore the opportunity to unify day opportunities, including specialist care to deal with the ever rising care and support needs of older people.

• Greater engagement with current Day Opportunities Service providers has taken place in particular to offer support with their learning and training opportunities to assist to enhance the service that they offer.
• A partnership with The Carers Trust (TCT) is forming to promote the day opportunities service offer for any carers that are linked in with TCT and also to support existing carers who access day opportunities
• The engagement has evidenced that the current day opportunities service model needs reviewing to meet current needs locally; working internally to explore common themes from the older people engagement and dementia engagement to understand what steps we could explore to potentially unify day opportunities moving forward.