“The ills of ageism are horrendous. But the gains from getting rid of it are fabulous,” said former Nominated Member of Parliament, Dr Kanwaljit Soin, at the Lions Befrienders Conference 2024.
The surgeon and ageing advocate was one of five keynote speakers presenting their views at the conference Silver Horizon: Building Aspirations for Successful Ageing, attended by around 250 attendees from the eldercare, health and community care sectors.
During her presentation, Dr Soin stated that successful ageing in Singapore would not be possible without first eradicating ageism, which she said has “a corrosive effect on older adults” and knock-on effects to society at large.
“Research has shown that older people with positive self-perceptions of ageing lived seven-and-a-half years longer than those with negative self-perceptions,” she said. “And the advantage remained after age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and functional health were accounted for.”
“It trumps all other social determinants of health and has to be baked into our health and social policies,” she added.
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Aim for an age-integrated, not age-separated, society
Dr Soin mooted an “age-integrated, not age-separated” attitude toward Singapore’s eldercare approach.
“Active ageing centres (AACs) and senior living homes might not be the answer, as they accentuate divisions in society,” she said. “We should create conditions for the old and young to work and live together; live, and die in the community, and not in old age homes.”
She also called for the removal of the retirement and re-employment age. “Ageing is very heterogeneous. Chronological age should not be a proxy for capability. A retirement age does not make sense,” she said. “Doing away with it is a radical idea, but we must be open to radical ideas and prepared to discuss and debate them vigorously.”
As her speech drew to a close, Dr Soin pushed other seniors to call out ageism, which she said is “one of the least called out of all the isms”.
“We must commission ourselves to end ageism,” she said. “Call it out more. Look for role models that push the boundaries. Take ownership and become passionate advocates for the issue.”
Silver volunteerism and purpose also discussed at Lions Befrienders Conference 2024
In his keynote speech at Lions Befrienders Conference 2024, Adrian Tan, co-founder of social enterprise SG Assist, detailed lessons from his company’s Care Agent programme, which combined senior volunteerism with lifelong learning opportunities and micro-employment.
He said that senior volunteers participating in the programmed were largely not put off by training, as they felt the skills might prove relevant to them in the future when managing their own ageing.
Volunteers also preferred to be given complex tasks like assisting AAC staff with administrative work, rather than simply handing out food, as they felt more engaged and valuable to the organisation.
This sentiment was echoed by associate professor David Allen at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, who spoke of implementing the Japanese concept ibasho – meaning a place where you can feel like yourself – in Singapore’s first health district in Queenstown.
The neighbourhood – whose proportion of residents over the age of 65 has already hit super-aged status at 22.2% as of 2022 – was transformed in line with the tenets of ibasho by NUS, National University Health System and Housing & Development Board, working in tandem.
Stakeholders from these organisations, along with ibasho coordinators, personnel from non-profit organisation FaithActs, community members, academics and advisors, also formed a 24-member, multi-generational committee to oversee the project.
Practically, this meant the development of “ibasho hubs” at eldercare facilities like AACs, which could recognise silver residents’ experiences as a valuable asset and give them ways to contribute meaningfully to the community with co-created programmes and micro-employment (nominal sum payments), thereby facilitating purposeful and inclusive ageing.
The next step for the programme, said Allen, who is also deputy executive director of the Centre for Population Health at NUS, was to conduct a baseline study with 5,000 adult residents from Queenstown to identify latent needs for future interventions.
After all, the benefits of having a purpose in later life are well-documented. Having a purpose is correlated with mental wellbeing, healthy behavioural actions like routinely visiting the doctor and exercising, and of course, a longer and healthier lifespan.
