Mr report to Council

Posted By: Pauline Maguire
Date Posted: 19/10/2009

Thank you Mr Mayor for the opportunity to report to the Council the latest developments on various matters relating to the Older People’s Portfolio.


Developments for older people are still progressing through two main strands:
• POPPs – Partnerships for Older Peoples projects
• Initiatives linked to the Council’s strategy for older people

POPPs

Having had funding confirmed for this financial year the team have spent time during the summer taking stock, reviewing systems and processes as well as analysing the data collected and planning some targeted publicity in specific geographical areas. During the next couple of months the team are also working on raising the profile of the project in the BME communities.

Transport
Transport continues to be a key service that POPPs can offer and new work has been identified and responses developed to meet new requests. Barry our Transport co-ordinator has been working closely with the Volunteer Driver Scheme to induct the new co-ordinator and recruit more volunteer drivers. It is planned that in the near future the Scheme moves its office into the Bus Station. The Shopping Link Service has been reviewed and modified to better meet the needs of the service users. Barry and Stuart have been meeting with the ambulance and hospital services to develop a variety of flexible options, including transporting people back from hospital when they are discharged and this work is due to start imminently.

Consultation
Iram, who previously co-ordinated the TOPPs committees, has a changed role within this next phase. Iram is working to develop a pro-active consultation group in each township which will link into the township structures. Iram’s role also now involves her working with community groups, providing services for older people, to help them to build capacity and sustain the activity via securing of funding and resources externally.

Outreach Service
Membership has continued to increase during the first two quarters of the year. A large proportion of the new members have been self referrals, followed closely by referrals from Adult care. Transport continues to be the largest area of need along with social activities to alleviate isolation and loneliness.

We have received an increase in referrals form Occupational Therapy, dieticians and other health services. This has led to an increased demand for armchair exercises and similar activity to assist with a return to independent living. General information and benefit checks continue to be high on the list of services required too.

Due to an increased demand in activities within the community a lot of the provision available is now experiencing waiting lists and a lack of places available. This is an area of work identified and currently starting to be addressed by the team. The summer months has seen a slight decrease in people wanting a home visit from the Outreach team. But this is now on the increase again, helped by the recent Professionals Day organised by the team, where over 40 representatives of services/agencies attended.

POPPs members are coming back to the service for further support and sign posting, some two or three times to date. This is very encouraging and tells us that we have obviously met their needs the first time they came to us. Work is needed on the database to capture this information as currently the database doesn’t do this and we only have a paper trail to track this.

Carers.
Karan, our Carers Support Worker has continued to identify carers previously unknown to services and support their access to other services supporting their role. A large number of carers have been identified and Karan’s workload has been big.


Recycled Teenagers & National Older Person’s Day.

Our final week of Recycled Teenagers will be held week commencing 28th September. We have lots of activities planned e.g. a health and wellbeing day at Deeplish Community centre on Tues 29th Sept and a celebration of National Older Persons Day on the 1st October. This will be include holding an arts and craft day at the Town Hall with spiral dancing and an Indian head massage. The evening will finish off with a wartime weddings performance at Touchstones.

Update Older Person’s Strategy

We are in the process of writing the older person’s strategy and developing the action plan for the strategy. We are currently working with services to ensure that an inclusive action plan is produced to fit in with the 7 Adult Care Outcomes.

Web Site Progress

Work is still in progress on the development of the older person’s website at the following link www.rochdale.gov.uk/olderpeople. The web team re tendered the work for the website. They asked thirty companies to tender, non from Rochdale responded, seven were short listed and were either too expensive or not high enough quality. We have decided to go ahead with Tangent one.

Dignity in Care Awards

This has now been rescheduled for Tues 20th October 2009. Age Concern has managed to secure Simon Weston the Falklands war hero. Age concern, have been dealing with all associated publicity for the event.

BME Elders Meeting

We attended a BME elder’s group meeting and a few BME people attended. We discussed the issues affecting them as older people. A suggestion was made by the group to invite representatives from BME groups in the borough to have this discussion again and requests were made by the BME community to be heard.

BME Consultation Event

A BME consultation event was held in response to the request mentioned above. The event was hugely successful with over 60 people attending from different centres throughout the borough. We had a good mix of men and women who attended too. We gained an insight into the issues faced by the BME community and these will be acted upon in the development of the strategy. Some needs analysis information was also gathered from this and this will be used to inform future projects or referrals made to other funding streams.


Reminiscence Project

We are in negotiations with Touchstones regarding the development of a reminiscence project to help older people with their mental health and wellbeing. We are hoping to develop this low level preventative service that can be invaluable to older people. We are also linking in with Dr Shakoor to ensure that the project is inclusive to all communities.

BME Dementia Project

We are currently in negotiations with Dr Shakoor to develop a BME drop in dementia project further. It is hoped that this project will help build the confidence of people suffering from this particular illness and help improve the health and wellbeing of BME people by developing low level preventative services that can be provided locally for people.




Councillor Pauline Maguire

Thank you Mr Mayor, I will be pleased to answer any questions from Members of the Council about these or any other matter relating to the Older Persons Portfolio