Scheme aims to add 2 years of healthy life for all

Two extra years of healthy living for every European by 2020 is the ambitious objective of a new EU venture — the European Innovation Partnership for Active and Healthy Ageing.

Ireland’s part in the venture is through The Collaboration for Ageing (Collage), led by UCC, and a Co Louth enterprise called Louth Age Friendly County. It includes contributors and partners from across the country.

George Shorten, dean of medicine at UCC, said Collage has developed novel and effective practices which support active ageing and will tailor them for transfer to other regions in Europe.

Collage is one of 30 sites around Europe, and has developed three “good practices” including:

nA screening tool which can reliably predict elderly people at risk of institutionalisation within a year.

Known as the Cart screening tool it was developed by Cork-based gerontologist Professor William Molloy. The tool, a questionnaire, is proven to work and collaborators from the Netherlands, Ireland, Spain and Portugal will travel to Cork next week for training in the use of Cart.

n“Let Me Decide” — an advance directive that allows people lay out a blueprint for how they want care delivered in later years. The person decides in advance who they want involved in making decisions about their care, but have the freedom to make changes along the way.

* The Great Northern Haven, a housing development for the elderly in Co Louth, where people live in “smart environments” where apartments are “sensorised”. The sensors allow GPs to view living patterns, for example, when the person leaves home, how many visitors call, when the telephone rings, and the amount of conversation that takes place.

The project, in place now for close to a decade, has allowed doctors to more fully understand how people are living and what needs to be done “so that people can live in their own homes for as long as possible”.

The challenge of ensuring that such practices, which work well in Ireland can also work elsewhere in Europe is largely an educational one. Prof Shorten pointed out that a key part of Collage is the Assert for Health Centre, a simulation-based medical and healthcare training centre located in UCC.

The Carts tool has already been used on 30,000 patients in Cork and Kerry and the HSE is funding its roll-out to 100,000 people. Prof Shorten said because the tool allows community health nurses to determine who is most likely to be admitted to hospital over the next year for example because of a history of falls or lack of support in their particular circumstances — community nurses are better informed before making decisions about who most needs regular home visits or chair lifts or single storey housing.

Prof Shorten said the Let Me Decide programme gave individuals greater control over their own destiny. “Essentially what our work is about is taking good practice that exists across Europe and scaling it and transferring it to other regions in order to spread the benefits, while taking into account differences in the manner in which health and social services are delivered in different countries.”

* www.collage-ireland.eu