Living well, ageing well
Living well, ageing well
Each enhancement to AIC’s existing support for seniors is achieved by ramping up service delivery and raising awareness through new and existing partnerships, initiatives, and types of care services available. Active Ageing Centres around Singapore will continue to improve service delivery and play an essential role in helping seniors access information on the latest health initiatives and available community care resources.
Active Ageing Centres
To support Singapore’s ongoing efforts to reduce social isolation and promote active ageing, AIC is working proactively to establish more Active Ageing Centres (AACs) and Active Ageing Centres (Care) throughout our island nation.
AACs are community hubs for seniors and will be poised to deliver an ‘ABC’ suite of services – Active ageing for healthy and active seniors, Befriending & buddying for seniors with no or limited social networks, and as an information and referral depot for Care services.
Meanwhile, AACs (Care) will provide additional care services, which include physical health improvement, mental well-being support, access to social connections, befriending and buddying services, and Care referrals. By 2025, the goal is to have 220 AACs following a population-based service model.
In 2022, AIC organised many events with our Community Care partners to discuss support areas and facilitate knowledge-sharing. These were carried out to uplift AACs’ capabilities and readiness to serve seniors and some of the events include:
Communities of Care
The pilot of AIC’s Communities of Care (CoC) programme was held from 2019 to 2023. Called ‘CoC 1.0’, it was developed to strengthen the construction of a place-based care ecosystem.
Through the pilot, various care providers worked together to create service networks by location to best serve seniors within each community. Leveraging on each other’s strengths and resources enabled them to boost service delivery and gain valuable learnings from the experience.
With learnings from CoC 1.0, AIC was equipped to develop a more structured approach for constructing a localised care ecosystem known as CoC 2.0. The Tote Board Community Health Fund also committed to supporting running CoC 2.0 for three years, from 2023 to 2026.
More pilot sites will be involved in testing and adopting strategies the care providers developed. The objective of CoC’s second chapter would be to create and implement a playbook to support the scalability and replicability of having CoCs across all AACs island wide.
Service integration between AAC and CREST
By working with AACs to support the larger community’s needs, AIC identified the opportunity to increase awareness of Community Mental Health (CMH) services and activities among primary and community care partners.
Information about CREST and client workflows have been incorporated into the AAC operations guide to facilitate the process between AAC and CREST in referring cases.
AIC has also engaged AAC and CREST partners to facilitate service integration and promptly establish a referral flow between them. The ongoing partnership involves ten providers across six constituencies, and plans are in place to scale the collaboration up to all AACs and CREST from 2023.