One of the barriers that service providers and policy makers face in delivering effective interventions is how to identify those experiencing or those most at risk of experiencing loneliness.
The Hidden Citizens project, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Social Care Research (SSCR), explores current understandings of and approaches to identifying loneliness and aims to provide innovative insights into how policy makers and practitioners can improve their outreach.
Their report, Hidden Citizens How Can We Identify The Most Lonely Older Adults, highlights and reflects on the main findings, summarising what is known about the factors that influence pathways into loneliness, how existing interventions and programs identify lonely older people, and what tools are currently available for identifying lonely older people. It also provides examples of good practice for ‘pathways out of loneliness’, which are presented with illustrative quotations from the research.
Extracted from: Hidden Citizens How Can We Identify The Most Lonely Older Adults