Aging Well in Northern Ireland with the Assistance of “Support Visitors”

How all of this started is part of our research team’s folklore. My Fulbright placement in 2009-10 was in a program called the Changing Ageing Partnership, funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, with a physical base at the law school at Queen’s University Belfast. A key mentor was the research manager, Dr. Una Lynch, who throughout my two-semester sojourn introduced me to top academics and experts in multiple fields related to aging services. For example, I ended up taking a class on the “economics” of social security and public pensions. My sabbatical project was writing a book about how to assist families and individuals when faced with the reality of financial abuse and exploitation. But, Una encouraged me to be more open to a positive future of aging and not just look at strategies for recovery from past problems.

One person she recommended I meet was Joe Duffy, an academic in the Department of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work. Our meeting over coffee one morning made it clear to me that while we were both deeply interested in creating better pathways for aging, we also had lots of other overlapping interests and passions, including music, cycling, and history. Soon I was attending his family’s vibrant Belfast-Nashville Songwriters events.

And so our friendship and our partnership began, allowing me to join up with Professors Subhajit Basu and Gavin Davidson, already key members of the team (and adding other overlapping interests for us, including great food — including a legendary “Thanksgiving” meal celebrated in England with Indian food). One memorable week was spent with Joe, Subhajit and me in a tiny office in Carlisle Pennsylvania, with them talking me through a recent survey they had conducted of older adults and family members, that revealed uncertainty about who could provide reliable advice about getting older, especially in rural communities in Northern Ireland. My hands were on the keys of a laptop, taking notes, and I was asking questions. Thus began a series of collaborative works for the Commissioner of Older People for Northern Ireland (COPNI), Claire Keatinge. See e.g., The Commissioner’s Report: A Summary of Advice to Government 2011-2015. Our team’s research evolved into formal recommendations for reform of adult social care in Northern Ireland, including recommendation for a program of structured visits by trained professionals with older adults.

Sixteen years after my first meeting with Joe, the team is reassembling in Belfast this summer in August, to implement strategies for “Aging Well.” The team is supporting multiple days of training for “home support visitors” for older people the Belfast region, using a model for outreach pioneered by Dr. Mikkel Vass, as summarized in his co-authored report on “Preventative Home Visits for Older People in Denmark: Why, How, By Whom, and When?,” for Gerontology and Geriatrics in 2007.

Keep an eye out for our progress reports in 2026-27.