Following the success of the Awards ceremony at Lord's Cricket Ground on 4th February (http://www.housingcare.org/providers/housing-for-older-people-awards-2010-event.aspx), several sponsors have already announced there readiness to support next year's Awards. Once again residents of retirement and sheltered housing will be able to vote using the special deck of cards which was used by 2140 people last year. 

EAC intends to double or even triple the number of entries. At the Award Ceremony, Lord McKenzie of Luton, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, said "I hope that your success will inspire all providers and managers of housing for older people to encourage their residents to take part in next year's awards".

Nomination Packs will be available from 1st September 2010, entries received till end October 2010, leading to the Awards ceremony in February 2011.

Watch the online version of the DVD by clicking the movie below:

A Celebration of Housing for Later Life

 

 

At last the retirement housing sector has its own dedicated awards. At the inaugural event at Lords on Feb 4th around 350 guests, including designers, providers and managers of retirement housing and over 100 elderly residents will be present to see 32 Awards handed out across 11 categories of retirement housing and housing with care. Uniquely, the finalists and the awards were determined by residents and not the industry –upholding the central aims of empowerment and listening to consumer feedback.

 

 

The list of winners and a special page on this event will appear shortly on our website

The nomination process for these new awards is now well underway. The response has been brilliant. These awards are supported by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and by the Housing LIN of the DH Care Networks. The Nationwide Building Society is one of its main sponsors.

For the first time residents of retirement housing, sheltered housing, assisted living, extra care housing, etc, can nominate schemes through a consultation involving them in small groups as well as individually. A deck of cards has been designed to stimulate discussions and help capture satisfaction ratings on design, services, and well-being.

Aims
• Publicly celebrate the best specialist housing for older people
• Engage thousands of residents in identifying what contributes to quality of life in traditional and emerging models of specialist housing provision
• Ensure that older people, families and carers have access to the best possible information
• Help shape the future of housing in later life

The Nomination Packs are available from early September 2009; nominations will be expected by the end of October, and the award ceremony will take place in London in January 2010. Housing providers and managers are asked to obtain Nomination Packs and to encourage their residents to participate. If you know someone in retirement or sheltered housing, please tell them about this opportunity to have a voice and be counted.

For general enquiries and order forms:
EAC Housing Awards, 3rd Floor, 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP
housingawards@eac.org.uk
Tel 020 7820 3755
www.housingcare.org

More information on this website at
http://www.housingcare.org/providers/eac-housing-for-older-people-awards.aspx

Elderly Accommodation Counsel (EAC) is pleased to announce the forthcoming launch of new awards for all forms of retirement housing. These awards are supported by the Department for Communities and Local Government, and by the Housing LIN of the DH Care Networks.

For the first time residents of retirement housing, sheltered housing, assisted living, extra care housing, etc, will nominate schemes through a consultation involving them in small groups as well as individually. A deck of cards has been designed to stimulate discussions and help capture satisfaction ratings on design, services, and well-being.

Aims
• Publicly celebrate the best specialist housing for older people
• Engage thousands of residents in identifying what contributes to quality of life in traditional and emerging models of specialist housing provision
• Ensure that older people, families and carers have access to the best possible information
• Help shape the future of housing in later life

The Nomination Packs will be available in September 2009; nominations will be expected by the end of October, and the award ceremony will take place in London in January 2010. Housing providers and managers are asked to obtain Nomination Packs and to encourage their residents to participate. If you know someone in retirement or sheltered housing, please tell them about this opportunity to have a voice and be counted.

For general enquiries and order forms:
EAC Housing Awards, 3rd Floor, 89 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7TP
housingawards@eac.org.uk
Tel 020 7820 3755
www.housingcare.org

Dear Colleagues,

We are endeavouring to find any research and evaluation evidence that exists relating to extra care housing for people with dementia including,

• the design and use of the built environment
• facilities, furnishings and equipment
• the social environment
• care, support and therapeutic services
• organisation and management.

The Housing and Dementia Research Consortium has been set up in order to help galvanise the generation the of robust research evidence which is directly relevant to providers and commissioners of housing with care for people with dementia.  One of the initial priorities identified for the Consortium is to find out what is already known about what works and what doesn’t work, disseminate the evidence, and identify where the gaps are to inform future research activity programmes. 

The new Housing and Dementia Research Consortium (HDRC) has received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to carry out a review of research evidence relating to Extra Care housing for people with dementia.

A hugely important part of the review is to locate findings from work organisations have carried out or commissioned that is not available in the public domain.

If you have carried out, or commissioned, any evaluation or research that relates to Extra Care Housing for People with Dementia we would be extremely grateful if you would send a copy of any information or reports you have before the end of December 2008.  Any information and documents we receive will remain strictly confidential and organisations and/or establishments will remain anonymous in the write up of the literature review if this is desired.

Please email hdrc@housing21.co.uk
or telephone 0370 192 4669,
or send hard copies of documents to:
Rachael Dutton
Research Manager
Dementia Voice
Hillside Court
Batten Road
Bristol
BS5 8NL.

The HDRC was set up by Housing 21, Anchor Trust, Hanover and the MHA and has a large and growing membership of housing with care providers, commissioners and other interested organisations and individuals including academics, designers and architects.
The Consortium will promote and initiate research into the approaches and practice which will best support those with dementia living in extra care housing, including care and support services, the social environment and building design.

On 21 November 2008, I attended in Brussels Better Life Time 2008, the annual conference of the European Network (EAHSA) a section of the International Association of Homes and Services for the Ageing www.iahsa.net , a professional body of providers of services for the elderly and care home industry in particular. 

The event was hosted by the Belgium bank Dexia and SODEXO, a company providing catering and other services for older people in care and health establishments throughout Europe. 

The theme of the conference was Ageing: from worries to opportunities, and reviewed the market under three main topics: Finance, Services and Real Estate.  The presentations (15) were generally good and informative, as was the Panel Discussion that followed it. I hope that the ppt presentations will soon be available on the Internet. 

It is a great pity that only Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, France, Sweden and The Netherlands were represented, and that there was no presentation on the achievements and prospects for this industry in the UK where new developments such as Extra Care Housing seems to be ahead of what is being developed in Europe to meet the housing and care needs of older people. 

Main points made at the conference

Effect of the credit crunch

• Despite the present financial crisis there is optimism that the care industry is alive and well, and that its market offers good opportunities for expansion, and for investors and developers.

• In France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and also Italy, the building of housing and care homes for older people (mostly for rental) seems much less affected by the credit crunch than in the UK where the housing market is dominated by home ownership.

• The effect of the credit crunch will be felt, not so much because authorities are not ready to invest, but because there will be less money in the public purse. In France, despite the need for more nursing homes, less money is likely to be allocated to this sector.

• In Germany the private sector already is hampered by its inability to borrow money for new projects.

Care services

• On the whole, on the continent, there is not a great deal of price difference between the private and the public sector.

• In France, in particular, this is because all care homes in all sectors are full, so there is no competition.

• In Germany, and probably everywhere else, the public sector models set the standards for the private sector.

• In Europe, governments have to set the conditions, standards of care service for a fast developing private market. The best innovation so far, and likely to take on throughout Europe, is the introduction of individual budget, as now fully operational in the Netherlands (?). This is going to have a considerable influence on the range or services that may have to be developed

• There seems however to be agreement that care at home is the most expensive form of delivery of care to older people

• It was also stated that there was no doubt that extra care housing is cheaper than ‘nursing homes’. This was not discussed, and is certainly not the conclusion in the UK, where people still argue the cost benefits of ECH versus residential care homes let alone nursing home

New developments

• The conference talked much about diversifying, new models of housing with care, yet the care industry seems to continue to bank on the care home model.

• However for Germany, the future of the market lies not in specialised housing, but in lifetime homes and the upgrade.

• It is not difficult to put together and obtain finance for the development of sheltered or care homes, but the essential problem remains: how to guarantee the delivery of services.

• In PPP in particular, local authorities find it difficult give account of what happened to the funds directed to the services provided by private companies.

New areas of growth

• Financial products to help elderly people pay for care

The Housing LIN is the national network for promoting new ideas and supporting change in the delivery of housing, care and support services for older and vulnerable adults, including people with disabilities and long term conditions. Visit http://networks.csip.org.uk/housing

The EAC Quality of Information Mark (QI Mark) was launched in December 2007 to encourage housing providers to supply EAC’s National Database of Housing for Older People with more and better details of their retirement housing schemes and developments. This was particularly relevant for Housing-with-Care and Extra Care housing schemes, where available services can include meals, domestic help and full personal care similar to that provided in a residential care home. 

At the time of the launch we decided to give the QI Mark to hundreds of schemes which had completed and returned our extra care questionnaires during the previous 12 months. This allowed us to populate this website with the QI Mark logo, and thus make it familiar in the retirement and sheltered housing world. 

However the QI Mark is valid for 12 months only. This means that schemes that had received the Mark effortlessly will now have to face the task of completing the full 7 page questionnaire, if they wish to retain the distinctive logo on this website. 

We expect that, at least for a while, the present number of accredited schemes (almost 1,900) will drop significantly. We will very soon remind housing providers to renew their QI Marks, but it is never too early to start.    

In addition to being highlighted on HousingCare.org, accredited schemes can ask for a printed certificate and for a QI Mark logo to use on their own brochures, websites, etc. There is a small charge for this service. For more information contact alex.billeter@eac.org.uk or phone 020 7820 1682.  

The EAC Quality of Information Mark (QI Mark) aims to promote and celebrate all forms of retirement housing, and ensure that older people have access to accurate and detailed information when deciding whether to move home. It is awarded to individual schemes following submission of a fully completed QI Mark questionnaire, and is valid for 12 months.

Schemes awarded the QI Mark are highlighted and fully described on EAC’s popular websites www.HousingCare.org and www.extracarehousing.org.uk and in scheme lists distributed through our Advice Line. They will be promoted similarly through the newly launched FirstStop Care Advice service. The promotion of QI Marked schemes in all these ways is a completely free service by EAC.

 

There are as yet no commonly agreed definitions of Extra Care Housing. This may encourage innovations, but it is bound to be confusing.

 

 At EAC we consider Extra Care Housing as one specific type amongst a large array of types of housing schemes and developments for older people, which offer a wider range of services than are available in standard sheltered or retirement housing schemes. We call this large array Housing-with-Care.  Within Housing-with-Care, we are trying to limit the use of the term 'Extra Care Housing' to schemes and developments in which personal care services are available to the residents, on site, 24/7, as one would expect in a residential care home. That definition corresponds to the model encouraged and funded by the Department of Health www.networks.csip.org.uk/housing and the Housing Corporation. 

Various attempts have been made to devise a typology of housing for older people. See for instance p33 of http://www.housingcare.org/downloads/kbase/3004.pdf . We welcome this while realising that in a market flooded with terms such as ‘very sheltered’, ‘assisted living’, ‘independent living’, ‘retirement village’, what matters more than a name is the clarity of the information detailing each scheme or development. This is why we have been urging housing providers for over 15 years to supply our National Database of Housing for Older People with more and more details. To tease them further into helping us, we have recently introduced the EAC Quality of Information Mark which is discussed elsewhere on this website.

If you think that some other Housing-with-Care categories are ripe for a commonly agreed definition, please let us know. Close care is probably the next one in line.