Residents urged to make elderly neighbour their 'buddy'

Annabel Williams • Published 21 Jan 2009 12:00 0 Comments

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CAVERSHAM's 50Plus+ Forum members have heard how becoming someone's buddy could be more important than just being friends.

Peppard ward councillor Mark Ralph introduced his buddy scheme for the elderly, where older people call each other once or twice a week to check on each other's welfare.

Cllr Ralph said he had organised a pilot of the initiative, using Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinators to pair up pensioners of the same gender and roughly the same age to informally look after each other.

Cllr Ralph already has 25 co-ordinators signed up, and his next move is to approach social services and the police.

After the meeting, he said: "We have an ageing population and that's going to impact taxation and public services.

"Everybody gets to the point where they can't look after themselves any more, and nationally there are 2.2million pensioners living below the poverty line, some on less than £5,000 a year and 12% cut back on food.

"They tend to stay at home staring at the same four walls, so people don't notice when they don't appear for whatever reason.

"Sometimes the first sign anything is wrong is when the police are breaking down the door because someone's fallen over or worse.

"The person has to go through the whole process of going to hospital and recovering, then social services are involved. That process costs a lot and is a very unpleasant experience for the individual concerned.

"This scheme is designed to treat the problem at a much lower level, it's help in quite small ways rather than the whole emergency services process.

"This is designed not to be intrusive in any way, and there will be safeguards against nosey neighbours. There will be training on what questions to ask. It's about health and wellbeing and the safety and security.

"The scheme has to be supportive, rather than a source of irritation, and if it's a success, hopefully it will be rolled out across borough and maybe even nationally."

This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 22 Jan 09

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