Healthy Loneliness 2020
Empowering citizens to face loneliness, being healthy and active.
Could our elderly loneliness situation be improved?
Unwanted loneliness has intensified in the world as modernization occurs. This project addresses elderly loneliness, a fact that grows every day and that represents a decrease in the quality of life of many people in our society, hindering their health and well-being. This project will provide elderly and other actors with tools to tackle with their loneliness feeling, increase self-esteem, and understand that living alone does not mean living in loneliness.
Beyond to the work done in Healthy Loneliness 2019, we propose a new educational program to create an enabling environment to minimize the negative effect of undesired loneliness in the elderly and to foster healthy lives. Healthy Loneliness 2020 envisions new face-to-face sessions which will deliver a set of tailored educational materials supported by ICTs, by introducing behavioural changes based on stronger social interactions. Whereas the project in 2019 focused on seniors, in this extension we aim to reach a wider audience, enrolling persons from the context of the seniors (caregivers, social workers, relative and policy makers) as a way to maximize the impact of the educational intervention. The program is an evolution of the program presented in Healthy Loneliness 2019 – reinforcing the strengths and minimizing the weaknesses, taking profit of the contextual opportunities in the four implementing sites of the project.