Mixing young and old people can extend lives

A lifetime of adventures as a cocktail bar tender, shipping company messenger and clerk in the Royal Artillery has given Paul Crowson many stories to tell. Young people love hearing how to make the perfect mojito, how he has travelled the world and how his wife was a professional chef in all the top hotels.

To tell these stories the 88-year-old has to get out and meet new people because he has no regular visitors and can no longer name a single neighbour in the north London apartment block where he has lived for 40 years. Friends and family? “They’re all dead,” says Mr Crowson, who had no children of his own.

His beloved wife Barbara died from cancer four years ago. “That was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I didn’t want to leave the flat at first but I got so lonely that in the end I had to go out and try to make something of my life,” he says.

To overcome his lonelieness Mr Crowson joined a weekly cooking club for budding chefs of all ages. The club, at Abbey Community Centre in Kilburn, is run by North London Cares, a community network set up to tackle isolation by running social activities that bring different generations together.

“l love coming here,” says Mr Crowson. “We learn a new recipe every week and it gets me out and meeting interesting people instead of sitting at home looking at four walls all day. I was talking to a couple of students the other day. One of them had been to India and Dubai; another had just got a job in a film company. Young people really are adventurous and go-getters these days.”

North London Cares is not a healthcare charity and makes no claims about keeping older people healthy or reducing the strain on GP surgeries and A&E departments. Yet a growing number of health professionals and researchers believe that’s exactly what “intergenerational activities” like this can and do achieve.

Just as the harm caused by loneliness has been compared to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, the thinking now is that “age apartheid” can make us sick. Now new draft guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), due to be finalised in November, says there is good evidence intergenerational activities improve health outcomes – and recommends all local authorities support and provide such schemes.

North London Cares, founded four years ago, has just celebrated its fourth birthday. Two-thirds of its older participants live alone and half are aged over 80 but the boroughs it covers – including Islington and Camden – are also full of high flying young professionals from all over the world, with no roots, explains the charity’s founder, Alex Smith. “Their older neighbours are often people who have lost their social connections in this rapidly-changing city but still have deep roots. They have so much to gain from hanging out together.”

Intergenerational activities are of course nothing new - they are what good communities have always been about. However, with the rapidly ageing population, the globalised workforce, cuts to social care funding and an economic downturn, the traditional community has taken something of a battering, with some research showing that just five per cent of those over 65 have any form of structured contact with younger people.

“Over the last 50 years we have ended up with an apartheid between young and old,” says Guy Robertson, a former Department of Health policy advisor on ageing and author of How to Age Positively. “We work and socialise in age-segregated worlds. It’s not a healthy society.”

Meeting older people is important for young people’s long-term health too, he says. Research has found that our stereotypical view of ageing – as a downward spiral of illness and lonelieness – is formed early in life. If these views aren’t challenged by mixing with older people, they become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to poor health outcomes. US research for example, has found that young and middle-aged adults who were pessimistic about getting old were twice as likely as optimists to suffer a heart attack or stroke within 30 years.

Millions of grandparents provide childcare and millions of middle-aged people look after their parents. But even if all British families decided tomorrow to live together and care for each other, it wouldn’t be enough, say researchers: by 2017, the number of older people in need of care is predicted to outstrip the number of family members able to provide it, according to last year’s Generation Strain report by the Institute for Public Policy Research. To contain the rising costs of health and social care, says the institute, we need to focus on keeping older people healthy by involving them in their communities.

It might sound like well-intentioned woolliness, except there is now good research to show that intergenerational activities have health benefits. The researchers behind the new NICE public health guidelines on independence and wellbeing in older people looked at examples around the world, especially Japan and North America, and agreed there was consistent evidence that intergenerational schemes could save lives among older people, especially where participants were giving back to society.

Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland already have government-backed, nationwide intergenerational strategies in place, although there is as yet no such nationwide strategy for England, where schemes tend to be patchy, small scale and run by arts and community organisations that are vulnerable to funding cuts and heavily reliant on lottery grants.

“Young and old people are great assets to each other and to their wider communities,” says Alan Hatton-Yeo, founder of the UK’s Centre for Intergenerational Practice, a charitable initiative set up in 2001. “We need to recognise the amazing potential that they have to contribute to society.”

In the north London borough of Camden meanwhile, teenagers at Haverstock School have been socialising with their older neighbours for more than a decade, including involving local pensioners in tea dances, films and even drama productions. Molly Kutapan, 83, has appeared in three school plays and has loved every moment. “I’ve always wanted to go on stage, but I never got the chance at school,” she says. “It’s so much fun coming here and being with young people.”

The grandmother-of-two, who was widowed in her 30s and lives alone, credited her visits to Haverstock School for keeping her fit, healthy and in good spirits.

“It’s definitely made me more active,” she says. “And it makes me happy. Sometimes it can get depressing in London. Everyone’s in a rush; people don’t know their neighbours. Some old people are depressed and on a lot of medication and sometimes they can go into themselves. It’s good to spend a bit of time with young people and get their outlook on life. I always leave the school on a high and go home happy.”

The sixth-formers benefit from the get-togethers too. Selin Sun started coming along to the social events when she was 14 and hasn’t missed an event in four years.

“It’s like a second family,” says the 18-year-old, whose last surviving grandparent lives hundreds of miles away. “I used to be quite closed in, but I’ll talk to anybody now, start a conversation at a bus stop or in the street. I’m much more confident.”