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

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.