Editorial

Citation

Klee, D. (2012), "Editorial", Working with Older People, Vol. 16 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/wwop.2012.56316baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Working with Older People, Volume 16, Issue 2

It is a year of celebration with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic games being held in London. It would be remiss not to mention these two events which are dominating the media and public interest.

The Queen’s 60 year reign is the longest of any monarch apart from Queen Victoria. The Queen at 86 years of age has a busy work schedule. Every day she carries out her public duties which include attending ceremonies, receptions and visits in the UK and abroad. She reads letters from the public, official papers and briefing notes. She has meetings with political ministers, ambassadors and her private secretaries. Every day of every year she is fully briefed on matters of her realm. The Queen is patron of over 600 charities and other organisations.

Moira Starkey, from Storridge was chosen to carry the Olympic torch for part of its journey. Moira is 84 years of age, she is described as “an inspirational charity fund-raiser”. Despite walking with two sticks and having recently had knee surgery, Moira completed a marathon walking the 26.6 miles in laps over the course of three months.

Two remarkable women from different backgrounds and with different roles but each making a significant contribution to society and demonstrating that age need not be a barrier to achieving great things.

This issue of Working with Older People (WWOP) is a very full one. There are two articles on domiciliary care, one by Stephen Gethin-Jones which follows his excellent article (part one) published in Vol. 15 No. 1 of WWOP. I was impressed with the reported results of outcome focused care and know that this article together with part one will be well received by local authorities as there is little evidence of the benefits of this approach.

Patricia Duff and Rosemary Hurtley have also written before for the journal on quality improvement and practice development for person-centred outcomes in domiciliary care (Vol. 15 No. 4 WWOP), this second article follows on from the first exploring the interface issues arising from the same audit.

The theme of a person centred approach is carried through in an article by Dr Elaine Argyle who reports on the assessment of a person centred approach with a group of care home residents using dementia care mapping.

In contrast to the three articles on care there are two very different articles covering areas that are new to this journal. The first is a fascinating article by Dr Mervyn Eastman on the journey of the Change AGEnts in becoming a co-operative. The UK Government have been promoting the co-operative model but it is an area that many of us know little about, apart from the place where we buy groceries or make funeral arrangements. I met recently with Mervyn and found myself swept up in his enthusiasm for the co-operative model particularly for organisations that are based on co-production as Mervyn believes that this is the only way to achieve real co-production. I hope he inspires you as he did me.

The final article to make up this issues interesting selection is one by Guojun Wang, Xing Su and Alan Hatton-Yeo on the impact of one child families in China on an ageing population. This is another very interesting article giving a different perspective on our changing demography.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate one of our editorial board Neil Mapes on Dementia Adventure’s selection to The Observer and NESTA’s Britain’s 50 New Radicals, inspirational Britons improving the lives of people and communities across the country. We will watch with interest and look forward to some articles from Neil and other “new radicals”.

Deborah Klée