Age-Friendly Cardiff Newsletter
Summary
The Age-Friendly Cardiff newsletter was introduced in June 2022, as a way of sharing useful information, advice and support to older people in the city. In each edition, the content covers information relating to each of the 8 key domains outlined by the WHO as key areas of focus:
– Community Support & Health Services
– Outdoor Spaces & Public Buildings
– Housing
– Transport
– Communication & Information
– Civic Participation & Employment
– Social Participation
– Respect & Social Inclusion
Wherever possible, a non-digital way of finding out more information about a particular event or service is included. Contact details for the Age-Friendly Cardiff team and Independent Living Services are also added.
The newsletter is published every quarter and circulated digitally to interested parties and key stakeholders. In addition, approximately 2500 hard copies are printed and distributed to various locations across the city, including doctor’s surgeries, Hubs and libraries, Care Hubs (day centres), leisure centres, community centres and 50+ groups.
The newsletter is bilingual – Welsh and English.
The team are committed to producing a newsletter that is useful for the older population of Cardiff and gratefully receive any feedback from older adults or stakeholders, which is used to improve the publication.
Key facts
Older people in general
Health, Housing, Information and communication, Social protection, Transportation
Learn, grow and make decisions
- Ageism
- Accessibility
- Ageing in place
- Dementia
- Healthy behaviours (e.g. physical activity)
- Intergenerational activities
- Inequities
- Inclusion
- Participation
- Technologies
Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):
Engaging the wider community
Local authorities
In the lead up to a new edition being produced, the Age-Friendly Cardiff team liaises with colleagues, partner organisations and groups to identify key topics to be included, and work together to decide on the final content and wording. This helps to ensure that the information is accurate and up-to-date. For example, in the winter 2024 edition, information regarding the RSV vaccine was included, and this involved liaising with Public Health Wales and colleagues from Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. This meant that the content matched the national messaging, and also included some local detail.
Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages
Moving forward
No
No
In the early stages of the newsletter being produced, some criticism was received regarding the background colours used and the contrast with the font colour. These comments were addressed and changes were made to subsequent editions.
Positive feedback has been received from various sources, including from older adult groups and partner organisations, who say that they look forward to reading the newsletters, and find the content useful.
New locations for physical distribution will continue to be identified going forward.
Looking back
It has been interesting to see the newsletter evolve over time, as a result of feedback received by readers and learning more about how to make engaging content.
It would be interesting to gather some feedback more formally to find out what other improvements/developments could be made to the newsletter going forward.
One of the challenges has been identifying suitable locations across the city for physical distribution. We addressed this by starting off with Council based locations (e.g. Hubs and libraries, Care Hubs) and then widening distribution over time as new locations were found (e.g. via networking, attending events etc).
