Healthy Aging CORE Research Spotlight: August 2024

Research Spotlight: Imagining Age-Friendly Communities within Communities

Imagining Age-Friendly Communities within Communities: International Promising Practices builds on the World Health Organization’s “Age-Friendly Communities” global initiative. This project investigates how culture and gender matter in creating age-friendly cities. Using international comparative methods incorporating ethnographic, survey, policy network, social work, cultural studies and arts-based methods, this study will unfold over a seven-year period in 12 communities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway and Taiwan. On the project website you can access publications from the project as well as digital stories.

New Statistics Canada Resources

The association between rurality, places of care and the location of death of long-term care home residents with dementia: A population-based study

This study compared the places of care and death of long-term care (LTC) residents in Ontario with a dementia diagnosis who died between 2014 and 2019 (n=65,375). The study found that residents living with dementia in urban LTC homes are more likely to receive care in the hospital and to die outside a LTC home than residents in rural LTC homes. 

New Research on CORE

• [Report] Supporting aging in the right place in Canada with age friendly community initiatives (Bryan Hong)
• [Framework] How to be an age-friendly business: A framework for customer-facing settings (Centre for Ageing Better)
• [Website] Municipalités amies des aînés au Québec (MADA)

New Journal Articles

Open Access Articles: Articles that are free and accessible to the general public.

Pope, N. E., Greenfield, E. A., Keyes, L., & Russell, E. (2024). A Review of Public Sector Engagement in Age-Friendly Community Initiatives. Journal of Aging & Social Policy, 1-29.

This literature review explored the ways that the public sector is involved in age-friendly community initiatives. The authors reviewed a total of 67 relevant articles from the United States and Canada. The review identified the continuum of ways that the public sector is involved in age-friendly community initiatives, which can vary by community in terms of the leadership role undertaken by the sector, presence of dedicated staff, availability of age-friendly champions, and involvement in assessments, evaluations, and reports. Key actions undertaken by the public sector to encourage age-friendly initiatives include supporting age-friendly values, adopting an age-friendly action plan, conducting staff training, facilitating age-friendly events and programs, and improving public spaces. The public sector can also influence external actors to become age-friendly (e.g., through thought leadership and frameworks, technical assistance, funding, etc.).

Kang, J. W., Oremus, M., Dubin, J., Tyas, S. L., Oga-Omenka, C., & Golberg, M. (2024). Exploring the differential impacts of social isolation, loneliness, and their combination on the memory of an aging population: A 6-year longitudinal study of the CLSA. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 125, 105483.

In this study, the authors examined three waves of data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging to determine whether social isolation and loneliness are associated with memory in community-dwelling middle-aged and older adults (n = 14,208). They found that experiencing both social isolation and loneliness combined had the most adverse impact on memory, followed by experiencing loneliness alone, experiencing social isolation alone, and being neither lonely nor isolated. Therefore, people experiencing both social isolation and loneliness are particularly important to target with interventions.