IFAS Executive Director Dr. Robyn Stone traveled in the summer of 2009 to London and Singapore to lay the groundwork for international collaborations in the areas of person-centered care and housing with services.
AAHSA’s Institute for the Future of Aging Services (IFAS) is working hard to create international research partnerships that shed light on the challenges facing the world’s elderly populations and test strategies to address those challenges.
“We are seeing a real movement toward international cooperation,” says IFAS Executive Director Dr. Robyn Stone, whose global outreach efforts brought her to London in July and to Singapore in September. “IFAS is committed to carrying out more collaborative work that develops, shares and adapts research about aging services around the world.”
Nowhere was this international cooperation more evident than at this summer’s meeting of the International Association of Homes and Services for the Ageing (IAHSA), where Stone met with researchers from the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to explore the possibility of conducting joint research projects.
“We’d like to work together to develop common ways of defining person-centered care,” says Stone. “We also talked about collaborating on some qualitative research that documents ways in which providers around the world are actually engaging in this approach to care.” Additional collaborations – including the possibility of conducting quantitative research on the effectiveness of person-centered care initiatives – will be discussed in November when several of IFAS’s international partners travel to Chicago for AAHSA’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition.
On to Singapore
Another partnership forged through IAHSA brought Stone to Singapore in early September to offer consulting services to the Tsao Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed in 1993 to promote successful aging in the Asian city-state. IFAS is helping the foundation design and obtain financial support for a three-year demonstration project that would deliver health and social services to older people living in Singapore’s densely populated and heavily subsidized high-rise housing estates.
“The foundation would like to develop and test an integrated system that would have a single point of entry where people would be screened, an assessment would be done, and then appropriate services would be provided as needed,” says Stone.
During her five days in Singapore, Stone and foundation representatives met with prospective program partners, including government ministers who oversee health, housing and transportation agencies and community-based organizations that could deliver services to older housing dwellers. Stone and foundation representatives also met with local companies that might furnish health information and remote monitoring technologies to the project and National Singapore University researchers who would partner with IFAS to evaluate the demonstration program’s effectiveness.
If funded, the housing-with-services demonstration could help the government of Singapore begin to address the needs of its rapidly growing older population, says Stone. In addition, she says, the project could hold important lessons for AAHSA members seeking ways to help their residents age in place.
“This work is very applicable to our community-based service providers and our senior housing providers,” she says. “We have much to learn from observing what works in Singapore and then adapting those lessons to our own housing and services models.”