Accelerate Wales Innovation Day

Action For Elders innovations in social care .

Accelerate Wales Innovation Day – Thursday 25 February 2021.

This digital event is a celebration of tech, health and social care innovation. Action For Elders have been recognised by the campaign for their Balanced Lives programmes, which deliver social care digitally.

As the event shines a spotlight on inspirational work happening across Wales, we tell the story of how we repositioned our highly successful in-person community Balanced Lives programme to become a multi-faceted online National Help programme for older people and their carers.

Innovation and adapting to a changing world

Since Covid-19 the lives of those in later life have changed dramatically. Loneliness and isolation have become huge issues for many older people. Community programmes are vitally important for physical, social and mental wellbeing, but what happens when you can’t deliver that community support for face to face?

Watch the video on the changes we have undergone on the right.

Digital Inclusion – Delivering practical help online

Delivering services online isn’t just a simple matter of making them available. Giving people access to those services is equally important, which is why we developed our Digital Inclusion Initiative. Many older people don’t have the technology, digital skills or access to basic Wi-Fi connectivity to allow them to communicate with their loved ones and the outside world.

Action for Elders offers bespoke technical support: ranging from dealing with connectivity problems to assisting them in getting set up on Zoom, so that they can talk to their loved ones. In special cases we were even able to provide tablet loans to our participants.

For more details on our Digital Inclusion promise:

Balanced Lives at Home

During the early months of the pandemic we put together a varied library of online exercises via our own Action For Elders site and dedicated YouTube channel, to help people keep fit and mobile. These included video from simple workouts, to exercises targeting specific areas of health such as fall prevention and arthritis relief. We are also providing advice on nutrition and mental wellbeing sessions to help people through these difficult times on our constantly evolving digital platforms…

Balanced Lives Live Sessions via Zoom

Direct social contact is of vital importance and our live Zoom Sessions deliver everything from gentle seated exercises for those with limited mobility through to more advanced H.O.P Healthy Older Person 45-minute standing sessions that demand and help maintain a higher level of fitness.

Safe Social Groups

The Balanced Lives programme is an innovative complete package, which recognises that health and mental wellbeing are interconnected. To this end we offer regular weekly Q&A sessions that answer questions on loneliness, anxiety and general wellbeing. We provide a safe social environment for all our live groups and our wealth of fun activities include DBC a regular live Digital Book Club which enables people to talk about their lives and experiences via their favourite books.

Think differently about ageing

Our Balanced Lives programme is a complete lifestyle package and numerous testimonials show that we have made a huge difference not only to older people, but also to those that care for them. We give everyone the tools to help themselves. Our innovative package of services is all about prevention and lifestyle improvement, that’s why we are asking people to #ThinkDifferentlyAboutAgeing.

We Want to Do More

Our Balanced Lives programmes are working tremendously well in all sorts of communities, but we want to do more. S4C recognised our achievements and granted us a free advert on their channel that aired all through Christmas up until the New Year.
Watch our S4C Ad to see how you can help us continue to innovate and provide our services.