An Irish social engagement project for older people won the European Civil Society prize in Brussels on Thursday. Age Well, a peer-to-peer service in which older people are visited weekly in their homes, beat four other shortlisted European projects to receive €14,000 from the European advisory body, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), in its first Civil Society week.
“It was amazing to win”, said Áine Brady, from Third Age Foundation that has been running this project since 2018 with part-funding from the HSE. “We were delighted and surprised. It’s hugely important to get recognition for our work and the prize money will be helpful.”
Over the last five years, more than 500 older people in Co Meath have benefited from the programme, many of whom were referred by public health nurses or GPs.
The Third Age Foundation is hoping to expand the programme to other parts of Ireland. At the Brussels event, Brady said that Age Well could also be expanded throughout Europe. “The longer people stay with the programme, we see reductions in their loneliness and improvements in their wellbeing, social and emotional connections, physical activity and self-rated health.”
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Age Well is managed through a team of trained companions – who are older people themselves – who provide weekly visits and midweek phone calls to older people. Every two weeks, an app is used to track changes in the physical, emotional and social health of clients and referrals are made to services if necessary.
The app also monitors any new symptoms such as confusion, changes in mobility, falls, decline in appetite or pain. “This works as an early warning system identifying health, social or environmental problems before they escalate,” said Brady. “And doing this work also gives the companions purpose, meaning and self-worth at this stage in their lives.”
An Italian project that runs prevention and awareness programmes on eating disorders (Telling Stories for Good from Animenta), a Finnish project using digital and tabletop role-play games to support mental health recovery (The World of Recovery from the Lilinkoti Foundation), a Slovakian project in which a person with lived experience of mental health and a health expert give talks to secondary school students about mental health (Crazy? So what! From Integra) and a Finnish community-led mental health centre (Lapinlahden Lahde) were the other shortlisted projects. Each of these received €9,000 in prize money.
Civil society organizations play a pivotal role in providing services that are currently not adequately supplied by the public health system, with particular attention to the special needs of vulnerable groups
— Oliver Ropke - president of European Economic and Social Committee
The EESC chose mental health as its theme for this, its 14th civil society prize, in recognition of the impact of multiple crises of war, cost of living, natural disasters and fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic on the mental health of European citizens.
“Civil society organisations play a pivotal role in providing services that are currently not adequately supplied by the public health system, with particular attention to the special needs of vulnerable groups”, said Oliver Ropke, the president of the European Economic and Social Committee at the prize-giving ceremony. In total, there were over 100 entries for the Civil Society Prize from the 23 member states of the European Union.
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