Living well in later life is important for all of us. Older people’s expectations are changing. The ‘new old’ are healthier, more active, and more technologically engaged. To meet these changing expectations requires a wider mix of age friendly housing options and healthcare supports to suit diverse lifestyles.
These housing options include both adapting existing homes to better suit peoples’ needs as they age, as well as building new housing developments, for sale and for rent, that are attractive and appealing to older people.
An Age Friendly Home is a home that is suitable for use across the life course for people of all ages. It is particularly suitable for older people whose needs often change as they age. Age Friendly Homes incorporate key features such as level access and connection to the outdoors. They are integrated into the neighbourhood and are capable of incorporating assistive technology to support ageing in place. Developing Age Friendly Homes helps to future proof housing for an ageing population.
Age Friendly Ireland are working in a number of areas to support the delivery of and access to Age Friendly Homes for older people in Ireland such as:
- Age Friendly Technical Advisor based in each of the 31 local authorities. They are a key point of contact for matters relating to age friendly housing technical queries specifically around designing for life and universal design principles.
- The agefriendlyhomes.ie website (managed by Age Friendly Ireland), was created as an action under the ‘Housing Options for Our Ageing Population: Policy Statement, 2019‘. The website provides resources, guidance and links to other sources of information to support people to live well as they age. Here you will find information on new and existing homes, grants and funding, healthcare, design information, technology, public realm, regulations, policy and research.
- The Healthy Age Friendly Homes Programme aims to support older people to live in their own home, or a home more suited to their needs, with dignity and independence, for as long as possible.
- Delivery of Age Friendly Housing & Public Realm Training. The course aims to further equip interested parties with essential knowledge and skills to maximise the age friendliness of their environment, and to ensure effective planning for older people is adequately considered and addressed in housing policy formulation and implementation. The Age Friendly Housing and Public Realm training is CPD approved by Engineers Ireland, the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and the Irish Planning Institute (IPI).
- Suite of technical resources on Age Friendly Housing including ‘Age Friendly Ireland Housing Case Studies‘ – a publication that details models of good practice in every local authority area, benchmarked against the ‘Ten Universal Design Features for an Age Friendly Home.’