Editorial

Welcome to our bumper July issue of Generations Review online! We are delighted that this issue mainly focuses on exciting and new developments by our colleagues in Northern Ireland. This issue is most certainly testament to the increasing profile of ageing research, policy, practice and education in Northern Ireland and highlights some key issues that we now experience since devolution.

News and reviews within any Society always involves times of celebration and times of sadness. We have reports on many exciting developments in the ageing world. BSG members have been engaged in work to improve the lives of older people with the development of a new strategy for BSG (Judith Phillips), new initiatives to promote our identity and improve communications at BSG (Wendy Martin), an exciting new MRC network on resilience (Gill Windle) and a timely and fascinating ESRC seminar series on ‘New Ageing Populations’ starting in the autumn (Karen Lowton, Paul Higg and Karen Ballard). We also have reports on some engaging research disseminated at recent conferences:a BSG event in Scotland (Louise McCabe) and IAGG in Paris (Maria Zubair). There are also reports on the new Green Paper ‘Shaping the Future of Care Together’ (Stephen Burke) and research on personalisation and specialist housing (Wendy Gornicki). We also remember the sad loss of one of our colleagues, Peter Townsend, who gave so much to ageing research throughout his life. We thank Alan Walker for leading the many tributes to Peter that reflect his lasting influence on ageing policy and research.

Our profile this month is Dr Una Lynch, of Queens University, Belfast. Dr Lynch answers our questions and tells us how she has had a fruitful career, including working for the World Health Organization, with no obvious career planning, instead a determined character and a willingness to be flexible and always make the most of all opportunities.

We have an exciting and stimulating research section focusing on research carried out in Northern Ireland. Lisa Glennon and Brice Dickson’s paper Making Older People Equal explored whether other countries with legal systems comparable to that of Northern Ireland had been able to give older people better protection from being discriminated against when seeking to buy or use goods, facilities and services. In their paper on F ruit and vegetable consumption among older people in Northern Ireland, Katherine Appleton and Jayne Woodside report their findings on levels and patterns of fruit and vegetable consumption of older people in Northern Ireland as well as offering ways to increasing fruit and vegetable intakes. Our third paper by Carmel Hughes Prescribing for older people in care home - control, context and culture highlights important issues relating to prescribing practices in care homes. Karola Dillenburger and Lyn McKerr explore in their paper Unpaid older carers: The backbone of community care - What community care? the views and experiences of informal carers of disabled people and give an interesting insight into their lives, challenges and opportunities. Our final paper is by Nicholas Humes and Drs Karim Hadjri and Peter Milligan, on Computer-based tools for designers to improve decision making. They highlight how the person-environment interaction contributes to older people’s well-being and describe their new software that facilitates architects to design environments that enhance well-being in later life. We also have two PhD abstracts concerning patient centred-care and sexual health.

One of the outcomes of devolved Government in the UK has been the exciting way that social and health care policies are being tailored to meet local needs by the devolved administrations. In this edition we report on a range of policy and practice developments in Northern Ireland which cover the whole spectrum of activity. Sonia Mawhinney and Paul Webb report upon developments in supportive housing, Lisa Carolan and Leona Robinson describe a new hospital based assessment service, whilst Faith Gibson and Alexey Janes describe for us the development of a national reminiscence network. These activities demonstrate innovation and development from both statutory and voluntary agencies working to improve the lives of older people. Emblematic of the vibrancy of interest in the issues of ageing and later life is the development of the Centre for Ageing Research Development in Ireland (CARDI) as described by Judith Cross.

We are fortunate in this issue to have two interesting articles focussing upon education: one examining the process of organisational perspectives and one a more personal reflection. Una Lynch presents the development of the Changing Age Partnership at Queen’s University Belfast - a model that universities on the mainland could follow as a way of developing ageing research that ensures the involvement of older people. Pam Arnsberger from the, University of Hawaii School of Social Work, reflects on her time at Queens. Her perceptive comments on the strengths of age research are welcome. However, perhaps most notable are her observations of the similarity of the issues that concern older people and their families in both North America and Northern Ireland.

We would like to thank all of our excellent contributors for their time, enthusiasm and willingness to provide material. We are also keen to hear from any of our BSG colleagues who would like to write about their own areas of interest. The dynamic and cutting edge nature of the newsletter is reliant on everyone’s efforts. Naturally all contributions reflect the author’s own views and not that of the Society.

We are very much looking forward to our annual conference this year in Bristol (www.bsg2009.org.uk). See you there!

If you would like to contribute to any part of this newsletter we would be very happy to hear from you, so please contact us at britishgerontology@yahoo.co.uk

We look forward to hearing from you soon,

Wendy Martin, Samuel R Nyman, Christina Victor and Veronika Williams

Co-Editors.

University of Reading .