Social participation is certainly reduced if a person has poor mobility or is in a wheelchair. If someone is unable to go out, it's even worse.
However, in organizations or in Villes amies des aînés, or senior-friendly towns, there is a desire to try to reach these people. We are not talking about immediate or direct participation. We must use sentinel programs to target socially isolated people, give them access to services they never thought they could receive and put an end to their isolation in terms of human interaction.
All that does not happen right away. Time is needed for those people to regain a level of participation that would be closer to that of the rest of society.
There are some nice examples in the town of Granby, where there are a number of different stakeholders. There are firefighters, social workers and, especially, senior organizations that take advantage of the program you talked about earlier. I think that program should be better funded because the work being done in the field is really impressive. It is being done for and by seniors. So, there is a long way to go when it comes to funding, especially for this kind of program.
There are initiatives in the field that are also used to seek out isolated people and make them more socially involved. A lot of interdisciplinary and intersectoral cooperation is needed. Social workers in health care and firefighters are involved, among others. Some of them are referred to in fire halls as “seniors' firefighter friends”. That's a step in the right direction. You can really see that people are working on making things better.
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