You are correct, Dumfries and Galloway has a greater proportion of older people partly because its such an attractive area and people like to retire here. The council and health service do provide care services and the Scottish Government provides funding for personal care services both at home and in residential care. There is a very interesting project being run at the Crichton Campus on providing services for older people and how they are involved in shaping these services – its funded by the EU and I am hosting a reception and briefing for them in the Scottish Parliament next week. They are looking at how services for older people in other norther European countries.

Social Work Services assess older people who are not able to look after themselves and arrange an appropriate care package to suit. I sit on SWS committee and we set the policy and scrutinise the delivery to ensure that older people can stay in their own home, which is where they want to be, for as long as possible.

It’s not the disaster that some people seem to think. Many older people today have had a good start in life- good diet, more exercise when they were young- fewer cars, and better medicine. This means that an average seventy year old today is probably as healthy and active as the average 60 or even 55 year old was 30 years ago. So instead of panicking and saying; ‘My goodness, what are we going to do with all these old people?’ we should realise that the majority of old people will be able to look after themselves until very late in life. However, there’s no doubt that some will require extra help. Most people prefer to stay in their own homes for as long as possible, (and this is cheaper than putting them into care homes) so the solution is to do things which will make this possible. I’m thinking of things like ramps up to doors, stair lifts, cigarettes that extinguish when you stop inhaling (these are universally sold in Canada and the USA) so that people don’t fall asleep in bed and burn themselves to death. There’s also ‘smart’ technology like sensors that send out a signal to a monitoring station so that if someone has (say) a heart attack and therefore stops moving, social services will be alerted quickly and come to help them. These are some of the ways we can help old people, and some of the technology is not too expensive so hopefully we can afford it.