On October 26th 2021, the European Project SHAPES hosted the fourth edition of its Dialogue Workshops, which aim to gather relevant stakeholders in the integrated care delivery for older people, with an emphasis on the support and reinforcement of these citizens’ independency and autonomy, so that they may age actively and healthy at home.
In fact, understanding the ageing phenomenon and building an ecosystem of digital solutions to support ageing at home is the ethos of the SHAPES Project and, in this Workshop, it fostered a discussion on the challenges affecting the older persons’ quality of life, including their personal health and social care systems, so that a comprehensive answer may be sought considering the whole organisational, structural, social, and technological perspectives for ageing well.
Organised by the AGE Platform, the 4th SHAPES Dialogue Workshop was dedicated to the theme Diversity and Empowerment: Understanding the Realities of Older People and it provided an overview of real life stories of older people across Europe, based on the ethnographic work conducted in the SHAPES Project. The SHAPES stories revealed how an older person in the Czech Republic deals with the fear in pandemic times, how an older person in Northern Ireland handles the growing frailty and lack of mobility, how an older person in Greece struggles with obesity and lifestyle changes, how a deafblind older person in Spain faces the physical and cultural barriers on a daily basis, how an older person in Italy uses technology to remember a lifetime of memories, how an older person in Germany becomes a caregiver, while caring for self.
To know and understand the idiosyncrasies and contexts that form lives, individuals and societies has set the tone for an intense and stimulating dialogue that, using real-life experiences, aimed to challenge prevailing preconceptions associated with ageing and to demonstrate that there are new forms to think the healthy and active ageing, enabling better quality of life and increased participation of older persons in the decision-making concerning own care. The results of the 4th Dialogue Workshop will be a comprising element of the work undergoing in the SHAPES Project, to be concluded by 2023.