Life Long Learning.What everyone wants is to stay well longer and be less dependent on other people The Living Longer Better Programme will help you achieve this. It will help you achieve the goal not just a longer life but a longer healthier life , reducing your risk of dementia and frailty and therefore reducing the need for social care.
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We are not just an information service, although the Live Longer Better programme is based on the best current scientific evidence. There is a growing understanding of the need for new thinking about population ageing both for individuals and for society, and for practical steps to be taken to put this thinking into action.
The shift in focus is from life expectancy to health life expectancy, or to put it another way from lifespan to healthspan, although it is still essential to remember the huge difference in life span between people from the wealthiest and the most deprived subgroups of the population. The other significant shift is from ‘care’ where that implies merely doing things for people who can no longer do those things fo themselves to a new culture of enabling them to regain the ability to do those things, a culture of enablement. The Live Longer Better programme is designed to give people the knowledge, motivation and tools to make this shift.
The Live Longer Better learning programme is for people living longer, for their supporters and enablers, both professional and voluntary and for the leadership of all the organisations involved in population ageing.
The shift in focus is from life expectancy to health life expectancy, or to put it another way from lifespan to healthspan, although it is still essential to remember the huge difference in life span between people from the wealthiest and the most deprived subgroups of the population. The other significant shift is from ‘care’ where that implies merely doing things for people who can no longer do those things fo themselves to a new culture of enabling them to regain the ability to do those things, a culture of enablement. The Live Longer Better programme is designed to give people the knowledge, motivation and tools to make this shift.
The Live Longer Better learning programme is for people living longer, for their supporters and enablers, both professional and voluntary and for the leadership of all the organisations involved in population ageing.
Our programme is designed around three key groups
CitizensThe aim of the programme is expressed as being “ to give you an understanding of what is happening to you and around you so that you can be more positive, maintain a strong sense of purpose, and reduce the impact of what most people think is the effect of ageing”.
The programme was initially designed for all people who were living longer, for example people just approaching retirement, a point of transition we now call renaissance! We have also developed a programme for people who are already fighting the effects of 2 or more and who have had significant encounters with the NHS, for example a recent hospital admission. The early results from this programme are very encouraging with people determined to fight not only the effects of disease but also the negative, pessimistic attitudes they encounter often the result of ageism. |
Professionals and VolunteersWhat word should we use to describe what people do when they are helping people cope with low, medium or high dependency? The usual word is ‘caring’ which has come to mean doing practical things for people. Another term which is increasingly used is enablement, the process of supporting someone, with the aim of helping them become less dependent by increasing their physical and mental capacity. Many enablers are paid to do this but many act in a voluntary capacity and many of these are themselves in their 60s, 70s,80s or 90s.
Studying on this programme?
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LeadersThe 20th Century was the century of the bureaucracy and the belief that all that was needed to meet challenges such as population ageing was to manage the bureaucracies supplying services well, and reorganise them from time to time. The 21st Century is the century of the system and the network and the leadership and management of all those services that can enable Living Longer Better need to understand how to develop a system for Living Longer Better and deliver the system’s objectives through networks.
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Shared curriculum across three key groups
Learning based on the latest educational methodsThe Living Longer Better Learning Programme has been designed and developed with Learning with Experts an Oxford company that has developed methods and resources for online learning in groups, which is much more effective than online learning in isolation. The programme has been designed to increase physical, cognitive and emotional wellbeing and reduce the need for social care, by preventing or delaying dementia, frailty and disability through life long learning
The discussion about the future of social care has depicted it as a tidal wave that just has to be funded but we now know that the need for social care be reduced because ageing by itself is not a major cause of problems till the nineties and the three other causes of problems, loss of fitness, disease and negative thinking, can be modified if people are given the right knowledge and the right level of support to change, which they can do, whatever their age. |