By Michael Robinson

What if?

Changing Ageing
Dr Bill Thomas
Age of disruption

Can we learn to live without nursing homes? How?

What if an entire city adopted a community-based approach to supporting mature people and their families, could this community live without nursing homes?  What would such a community look like?  Is it possible?  Why isn’t this sort of conversation happening more widely?

Dr Bill Thomas is a leader in advocating for a new approach to maturing.  He has excellent ideas, and is now challenging entire cities to envision a future where nursing homes are no longer needed.  We love his thinking and believe that technology, like LivBetter, can make this dream come true.  Follow Dr Thomas on www.DrBill Thomas.com or his blog on www.changingaging.org

http://changingaging.org/blog/the-age-of-disruption-is-here/

On donations

“Money makes the world go round”.  That seems true when it comes to providing support for older folk, and with service provider organisations in the aged care sector.  The competition for limited dollars extends into the donations area, where organisation compete for scarce dollars available. Many organisations ask: “How do we attract donations to our organisation rather than the competition?”

From a donor perspective, questions that might make an organisation more interesting might be:

  • What do people have besides money that they would happily share with our organisation?
  • What would be possible if we collaborated with our competition instead? What could that generosity help both of us accomplish?

On policies

Organisations and governments spend a lot of time formulating and applying policy. Does this create value for our future?   Maybe we could think differently about using policies that will help us in living better?

Instead of using policies to:

“Hold employees and service providers accountable and to safeguard organisations and care recipients”

 Maybe we could consider:

  • In our community how do we want to treat each other?
  • How could the our organisations and providers systems reflect those values?

Social activity is beneficial as we grow older

Social activity is part of the human condition, and it can also help you live better.  Here is a review of a book that explores this in more detail. One of the author’s conclusions is that: “People with active social lives have higher cancer survival rates than people who are isolated.”  Should we all start partying?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/22/the-village-effect-susan-pinker-science-of-friendship-book-review

Living better options

The living better question

If we ask: “What kind of nursing home is best for mum?”, we are guaranteed to go down the path of getting mum into a nursing home!

Maybe a more useful question might be: “How does mum want to live as she grows older?” That might open up a whole new range of possibilities for mum. This is a living better question.

What are the right living better questions for you as we grow older?

Gives and gets

This post describes what participants receive and what they contribute. These are the gives and gets!

The LivBetter Group Pty Ltd is the publisher of this website. We commit to create, lead and moderate an online conversation to discuss what we want as we grow old (and what we don’t want). This is what you get.

By participating in the conversation and sharing your views, we can create a better future, together. You share your opinions, perspectives and knowledge. This is what you give.

To lead the conversation we will use the Results Accountability process. This means that, after a short introduction, the conversation will start at the end point: “Describe how you want to live as you grow older”.

Thereafter we can usefully discuss different aspects in detail (such as housing, finance, care etc.) and how best to achieve the various end points.

We will attempt to summarise the conversation at regular intervals. This is our commitment.

Not discussed

This post highlights the topics that are not discussed in the Living Better Conversation. We are NOT discussing what others should or could be doing for us. Such discussion belongs in the many forums about entitlement and welfare.

This is also not the forum to discuss health care, aged care or anti-ageing treatments or products – again there are many other forums on these topics.

Please keep the conversation apolitical.  It is too easy to suggest that governments should just allocate more money to the ageing demographic.

If we can’t describe what we do want, then no amount of money is going to be enough!

Topics to discuss

This posts lists the topics to discuss in the Living Better Conversation. The conversation is aimed at people interested in continuing to live independently at home.

It is about what we can do for ourselves.

We want to discuss what each of us can do to live the life we want as we grow older.

This means takes responsibility for our own wellbeing and life journey’s.

The first step is understanding what we do want and how we want to live for the last third of our lives. Only once we have identified this, can we continue with a useful conversation on how to deliver this.