Age-Friendly Practices Around the World

Cities and communities around the world are striving to become more age-friendly. They seek to better adapt to the needs of their ageing populations. But what are they actually doing?

The World Health Organisation’s database of age-friendly practices highlights how these small measures can make a huge difference. Here are six of our favourites!

Australia: age-friendly Garden City Shopping Centre

The City of Melville in Western Australia values and embraces creativity and innovation. The city has been working with Garden City Shopping Centre to ensure that the shopping centre becomes more age-friendly and accessible for older people in the future.

The project aims to:

• Encourage local businesses to implement age-friendly accessible initiatives to support the older population and people with disabilities
• Raise awareness among the business community of the requirements and benefits of becoming more age-friendly and accessible
• Raises general awareness with the community around age friendly and accessible needs
• Supports local businesses to have access to free basic training and support around dementia and accessibility

The City has been engaging with people who use the centre as well as carers and organisations and asked what they think will make the centre more age-friendly and accessible for their needs.

The City has also partnered with Alzheimer’s WA and provided training for Garden City customer service, security and cleaning staff.

Canada: The installation of park benches

It can be difficult for many older people to enjoy walking in Ottawa without somewhere to rest. The availability of seating areas was identified as one of the top urban age-friendly features for older people who participated in the Older Adult plan consultations in 2011.

As part of the Older Adult Plan, the City began installing additional benches on footpaths in areas of the city with the highest concentration of seniors (based on demographic data). In order to determine the most suitable locations for benches within these areas, the Infrastructure Services Department mapped amenities such as retirement and residential aged care facilities, hospitals, shopping centres and parks. For example, placing a bench midway between an aged care residence and a shopping centre was considered an optimal choice of location.

Installing additional seating across the city represents a simple initiative that supports seniors to go out, access services and participate in walking and other outdoor activities.

Norway: Walker Rally

The Walker Rally is held every year in Oslo and awards prizes to seniors for completion of a certain distance route in the city, and also for the best decorated walker. It is an inclusive event where older people can participate with walkers, walking sticks and wheel chairs. The rally promotes the use of the city centre by the elderly, active ageing, intergenerational connectivity and a fun social activity for everyone involved.

Portugal: The Senior University of Gondomar

The Senior University of Gondomar was created in 2006 with 55 students, 12 disciplines and 10 volunteer teachers. The program aims to streamline and organise regular cultural activities of learning, entertainment and recreation for citizens aged over 50.

Currently, the Senior University has 340 senior students enrolled, 51 volunteer teachers and 52 disciplines including languages, arts, music, dance, gymnastics, culture and science.

The main objectives of the Senior University are to:

• Encourage participation and engagement of senior citizens in cultural activities, citizenship, education and leisure
• Disseminate the history, science, tradition, the arts, tolerance and other socio-cultural phenomena among seniors
• Be a centre of information for seniors’ services, duties and rights
• Develop the interpersonal and social relations between different generations

 United Kingdom: Dementia friendly cinema

Through its engagement with older people with dementia and their carers, the Elders Council identified a gap in the opportunity for people with dementia to participate in everyday social activities. The Elders Council heard about a cinema in another part of the UK that had developed a program of film screenings for people with dementia and approached a local cinema to see whether they would be prepared to develop a similar program.

The Tyneside Cinema welcomed the approach and developed a program. A survey was circulated through the community to gather views from people with dementia and their carers to establish the level of interest and what type of support people might need in order to participate.

The screenings started in July 2015 with a program of musicals – 40 people attended the first screening.

United States: Call A Ride Sausalito – Free rides for people aged 60+

Sausalito is a small hillside town bordering the San Francisco Bay in northern California. The steep, narrow residential streets – most with no footpaths – become barriers as residents age. The town’s shops and services are located on flat ground with public transport operating only on the main street, which runs along the waterfront. Residents in Sausalito aged over 60 has increased by 72% in the last 10 years to almost one third of the population with many of these residents living alone. Without transportation down from the hills, many older residents cannot access local services, participate in social activities or utilise the bus and ferry services.

Call-a-Ride Sausalito Seniors (CARSS) was established to tackle this problem. CARSS is a volunteer driver program providing up to two free one-way rides per day for seniors and people with disabilities in driver-owned passenger cars. Riders can call up to a week ahead or on the same day to confirm rides anywhere within the boundaries of the town and floating home community.

Drivers have to go through standard background checks and are provided with a short training course and must supply proof of insurance for their car. The drivers provide a door-to-door service including assistance carrying shopping bags. 

Search for residential aged care in: