Are age friendly communities also resilient communities?

In both absolute and relative terms the number of older people is increasing globally, and while everyone hopes to stay active and healthy as they age, seniors face particular challenges to maintaining health, and consequently make more use of healthcare services than any other age group. But the challenges faced by individual seniors and to our health care system can be mitigated by policy interventions that promote seniors’ health. In this paper we focus on one such policy that has generated global interest: Age-Friendly Communities (AFC). According to the World Health Organization these are communities, “where policies, services and structures related to the physical and social environment [that] are designed to support and enable older people … to live in security, enjoy good health and continue to participate fully in society”. Specifically we present the findings of a collaborative study of the perceptions of residents–old and young–regarding age-friendliness of one Canadian city, St John’s, the capital city of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Our study represents the first to test whether residents’ impressions of AFC characteristics differ by age.