Question

Why is it important for an older person to take shared responsibility for their own support?

Give two examples of services whose support can empower an older person.

How do the myths of ageing impact on older people? Give two examples.

What is meant by ‘social devaluation’ and how does this affect an older person’s quality of life?

What is meant by discrimination in relation to older people? Give two examples.

What is meant by ‘duty of care’ in relation to providing services to an older person? Give two examples of how you can uphold your duty of care.

What is meant by ‘human rights’ in relation to providing services to an older person? Give two examples.

Answer 1

Motivating your elderly loved one with disabilities to stay active is no easy task. It’s not just mobility issues that may hold them back, but a fear of injuring themselves, lack of self-confidence, or even cognitive decline associated with aging. From imagining new and fun activities with them to doing a little research and helping them connect with others, it’s more than possible to make a huge difference in their quality of life.

Brainstorm FUN Activities
Your aging loved one may not know what they want to do to stay active because they don’t know what’s possible. Talk to your loved one about their likes, dislikes, comfort levels and especially, what they used to enjoy doing. Not only will nostalgia inspire them, but so will sharing with them how much exercise and staying active will benefit them both mentally and physically. Fun activities for seniors with disabilities can include:

• Gentle yoga or chair yoga
• Assisting with cooking a meal
• Going for a walk (or roll)
• Visiting an arboretum or botanical gardens
• Low-impact weight lifting
• Assisted dancing
• Seeing a show or performance

Even when a physical impairment or mental decline affects an elderly person, routine exercise can continue to combat heart disease, promote a healthy weight, lower blood pressure, improve balance and coordination, reverse bone loss and more.

Help Them Connect with Others
The social isolation that can naturally accompany getting older is exacerbated by disabilities that make it even harder to get out and interact with others. Empowering your beloved senior with a disability is made simpler with the help of technology.

When possible, help your loved one connect online with family and friends – perhaps it is setting up a weekly Skype date for them to video chat with their grandkids. Or helping them get on facebook to connect with family members and old friends, and showing them how to share, message, comment and look at photos.

The internet is a great way for seniors with disabilities to find and engage with others like themselves too – use sites like Meetup.com to find local groups of seniors that share the same interests and meet up in person on occasion.

Find Easier Ways to Do Things
Simpler, practical solutions to empowering your favorite senior with disabilities are key to helping them stay active. Reflective tape, grab bars and other assistive tools and devices in the home can be helpful for seniors with mobility issues while virtual assistants like Google Home or Amazon Echo could be handy tools for seniors with visual impairment.

Simplifying the everyday tasks that can be time-consuming or tiresome for someone with a disability not only frees up time for them to focus on more fulfilling activities but bolsters their confidence level and seeds feelings of independence that might have slipped away with age.

Nail Down a Daily Schedule
A planned out framework for the day helps seniors, especially those with disabilities, manage and succeed in their day. With a set time for waking, dressing, toileting, brushing teeth, taking medicine, eating meals, exercising and going to bed, a fixed daily schedule provides structure and stability to your loved one’s day.

It also empowers them to feel more confident and independent and allows them to be part of the planning and decision-making process. When they know that between 2 and 3:30 pm they have time to exercise or do something just for fun, they will feel encouraged to pick an outing or activity themselves.

Help Them Help Others
Giving back has shown to help alleviate feelings of stress and boost overall mood for people young and old. Knowing that their presence has purpose, and their lives can positively affect someone else’s can be just the empowerment your loved one needs!

Historical and contemporary images of ageing have generally reinforced negative stereotypes of old age. An examination of sculpture, painting, poetry, literature and film, as well as television, advertising, newspaper stories, birthday cards and road signs reveals that old age is often shown as being a time of loneliness, depression and physical decline. These conditions do occur but their prevalence and severity have been exaggerated. There are many myths of ageing that have been influenced by these representations: that old people with physical or cognitive decline are social problems; that families no longer care for their elders; that geriatric medicine is an unglamorous specialty. Low expectations of old people and ageist thinking can adversely affect how we speak of disadvantaged old people. The challenge is to question inaccurate assumptions. Key to the improvement of medical care of older people is to extend the teaching of geriatric medicine and improve and coordinate research.

Social devaluation is an outlook or view of persons value to be less than the others in the group or society. The impact can be somewhat great to a person’s needs, psyche, and care in that they our undervalued thus less respected. The outcome becoming they are looked over and not appreciated for their potential value or actual value. This can not only affect the individual though the society itself. Society can be negatively affected because the underestimating of that person’s value could harm the group. In other words if the person is assessed more positively of their values or given more value on their first perception of this person the group has greater chance to succeed.

This is commonly viewed as a failing in society when a group or individual is undervalued. When African Americans, women or the disabled in the workplace are considered devalued the group or society finds it difficult to understand the traits of these individuals, and thus they are socially devalued. Often the comparison of the devalued group and the group as a whole is what social devaluation comes from.

If this person feels devalued they will become resentful, shielded, and this will cause conflict between parties (the person that feels valued versus the person that feels devalued). Within psychological boundaries the person’s care or needs go neglected, making that person feel useless, angry or ashamed often without fault of their own. If this person is under medical care, these responses can trigger anxieties, health problems that may have been in recovery, or were recovered. Thus, the needs are harder to meet for this person when they are perceived as having less value.

Age discrimination is when someone is treated differently, with an unreasonable or disproportionate impact, simply because of their age. Age discrimination can be direct, for example, denying older people access to healthcare simply because they are old, or indirect, such as not collecting data on HIV infection in women and men over 49. This failure to collect data results in the exclusion of older people from HIV and AIDS prevention programmes, and, therefore, discriminates against them. Discrimination in old age continues to be tolerated across the world. Ageist attitudes and stereotypes are common at every level: in the family, in the community, in the workplace and more broadly in society. Ageism and age discrimination may manifest themselves differently in different social, economic and cultural contexts but they remain rife, often unrecognised and accepted.

Duty of care: This refers to the obligation to take responsible care to avoid injury to a person whom, it can be reasonably foreseen, might be injured by an act or omission. A duty of care exists when someone’s actions could reasonably be expected to affect other people. If someone is relying on you to be careful, and that reliance is, in the circumstances, reasonable, then it will generally be the case that you owe them a duty of care. You need to be clear about exactly what the nature of the care or support is that you are providing, and on which the person is relying. Failure to exercise care in that situation may lead to foreseeable injury (in other words it could have been avoided with due care taken).

Human rights are about everyone, and they are very important for older people. We are all entitled to the enjoyment of human rights without discrimination of any kind, including discrimination on the basis of our age.

There are certain human rights and freedoms that are particularly relevant to older people, including the right to:

• an adequate standard of living including access to adequate food, clothing and housing
• the highest possible standard of physical and mental health
• work and fair working conditions
• be safe and free from violence
• be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
• privacy
• family life.