Like other cities globally, the municipality of Kristianstad, Sweden, faces challenges concerning the demographic transition. To mitigate some of these challenges, while simultaneously enhancing the chances of a satisfying life quality for all inhabitants of the municipality, we understand that it is crucial to promote age-friendly environments and contexts in our city and municipality.

The Municipality of Kristianstad has been conducting work within the area of age-friendliness for many years, with a main focus on promoting physical and mental health for our older adult population. While older adults are an integrated part of the inhabitants that all the Municipal departments serve, there is one department working mainly towards this target group: The Department of Social Care. A large part of the past and current work on age-friendliness has been/is conducted as an integral part of the core tasks of the Municipal Departments. With an increased coordination and development of the age-friendly work and perspectives, we believe that the age-friendliness of the city and municipality can be improved.

Our latest local action plan was called “Healthy ageing” (2021-2023). It included a range of activities and also involved different stakeholders, such as several municipal departments and companies, the local University, and the Civil society. The Municipality of Kristianstad understands that input from the local target group, as well as a close internal and inter-sectorial collaboration, is important to create well-chosen and well-designed interventions for increased age-friendliness. Our ambition is to further strengthen our internal and external collaboration, to foster synergy between on-going age-friendly work and future initiatives, interventions and innovations.

We believe that joining the WHO Global Network for Age-friendly Cities and Communities will contribute greatly to our work on age-friendliness through its required structure and its shared knowledge and examples.