Age Friendly

Chapter 4: Implementation
Task Two:
Setting Up Thematic Working Groups or a Service
Providers Forum
The second task at this stage is to set up working groups with clearly defined
goals to achieve. Some counties choose to have thematic working groups
to implement the Age Friendly Strategy. Other counties use their existing
Implementation group or have opted for a Service Provider’s Forum which will be
covered in the next section.
The Age Friendly City/ County Coordinator and the Age Friendly Alliance must
decide which working groups are required to achieve the goals in the strategy.
For example, are transport and housing the key issues that need to be
addressed immediately?
Deciding who becomes a member of the working group is a key task for the
Chairperson of the working group. It’s very important to have the service
providers and service users represented as well as any voluntary agency that is
involved with the area. For example, the Active and Healthy Ageing Action group
in County Louth has representatives from private and public nursing homes,
the Alzheimer Society, the HSE co-ordinator for older people and the voluntary
group working with older people in the county. All working groups will also have a
member from the Executive Committee of the Older People’s Council.
Make sure to get people on your working group who can make decisions and
have budget control over necessary changes to the area under discussion.
Often, it’s not about extra costs but about changing around what already
exists so that it suits older people better. The Age Friendly programme itself
doesn’t introduce a new budget but by reconfiguring existing resources and
sharing budgets to better match what older people want, really significant
improvements can be made.
So what’s needed most at this stage is Alliance members who are willing to
develop new ways of delivering existing services that will benefit older people
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