Seven Elements for Successful Community Engagement in the Care of Older Adults

Dig deeper into the evidence

Beyond the strategies revealed in the four case studies, the project team recognized the value of a broader exploration of literature across various fields to understand what drives successful community engagement in older adult care.

To support this, Fraser Health Authority’s Long-Term Care and Assisted Living Research Group conducted a Rapid Meta-Narrative Review, resulting in a comprehensive report on fostering successful community engagement in older adult care. This work brings together insights from different fields and provides helpful tools, key principles, and real-life examples to support you in starting, improving, or maintaining engagement initiatives with older adults.

Explore the Review’s executive summary or read the full report to discover evidence around topics including:

• Guiding principles of community engagement

• Different approaches and phases of your community engagement journey

• Practical methods, tools, and resources for engaging with community

Methods

An environmental scan and rapid review were conducted between November 2023 and March 2024. The team searched, reviewed and synthesized literature from several distinct and diverse fields addressing community engagement for care of older adults using meta-narrative techniques. In total, 98 sources (61 scholarly and 37 grey literature) were included in the review. Findings were presented according to overarching themes from the literature and reviewed by partners.

Approaches to Community Engagement

This rapid review identified three key approaches to community engagement.

1. Asset Based Community Development: This approach relies upon social relationships and mobilization of social capital whereby communities can foster desired change by identifying, connecting, and using existing assets.

2. Community-Based Social Innovations: This approach promotes innovations that enable older adults to care for themselves and their peers, develop social cohesion and inclusivity.

3. Living Labs: This approach applies a process of innovation to co-create through engagement with end users, i.e., older adults, care partners, community and community organizations.

Practices Used to Engage with Communities

Within these approaches, many engagement practices are highlighted, including:

• Asset Mapping: Communities use asset mapping to identify, describe and often depict their strengths and assets graphically on a map.

• Needs Assessment: Provides information about community social needs or issues and determines which issues should be highlighted for action.

• Community Action Plan for Engagement: Helps to prioritize community needs by setting goals and objectives. The action plan can be a part of a wider strategic plan for community or actions of the initiative that may be combined into existing processes and priorities.

• Champions: Include those within and external to the communities who bolster and sustain momentum of the initiative.

• Seniors Steering Committee: Creating structures such as an advisory council comprised of older adults and/or their care partners from the community to guide initiatives, so they remain relevant to the needs of their community.

• Systems-Level Engagement: Involvement of municipal, provincial, and/or federal government entities in a collaborative approach to work together.

• Co-Creation: Refers to end-user engagement in the development and implementation of ideas and concepts with a focus on improving the lives of older adults.

• Social Capital: Refers to tapping into the networks of relationships among those in a society that allow for individuals to work together to achieve a common purpose.

Phases in the Engagement Journey

The literature identified distinct phases in how engagement unfolds in initiatives. Initiation: Centering engagement around older adults and their care partners is a key starting point for engagement in initiatives enabling aging in place. Priority setting is also key to provide an impactful focus for initiatives. This can be aided through application of tools, such as Asset Mapping and Needs Assessment. Once priorities have been set, identify key actors to engage as partners in the initiative.

Implementation

Multilevel leadership and a common vision ensure commitment and alignment toward common goals for implementation. Successful implementation relies on managing conflict and positive relationships when developing diverse partnerships. Also, inter-organisational barriers should be proactively addressed. Effective governance and management are enabled by a diverse age-friendly steering committee that leverages lived experience and ensures community members continue to be engaged throughout the initiative. Establishing evaluative indicators in the implementation phase is key to assess success of the enabling aging in place initiative.

Sustainability

Engaging community champions and sustaining diverse partnerships is key to sustaining the momentum of the enabling aging in place initiative. Strong direct municipal engagement, such as embedding initiatives in local government, supports continuing systems-level engagement. Successful sustainability is enabled through diverse funding sources and proactively overcoming inter-organizational barriers. Last, but not least, sustainability is ensured through evaluation and monitoring progress to demonstrate value.

Please refer to the schematic in the final report for a visual representation of how the approaches, practices, and phases are related and intersect.

Resources and Tools

This report provides an abridged table of 27 sources from the review, offering an overview and links to helpful tools and resources. Refer to this table to quickly find and access practical tools with real-world applications categorized based on phase of the engagement journey (i.e., initiation, implementation, sustainability), approach to community engagement (i.e., Asset Based Community Development, Community Based Social Innovation, living lab) and type of source (i.e., online repository of resources, toolkits and case studies). The table starts with comprehensive resources followed by more specialized tools for a specific engagement approach, practices, or phase(s). The table provides national (e.g. Government of Canada, Public Health Agency of Canada, United Way) and international (e.g., WHO, United Nations) resources.

Contributors

Janice Sorensen, Ian Fyffe, Sherin Jamal, Kirsten Rossiter, Leah Coppella, Benajir Shams, Paulina Santaella, Simran Dhadda, Catherine Youngren, Karim Chagani, Satinder Jassal, Annette Berndt and Sultan Akba

Carol Fancott, Miranda Saroli and Adrienne Zarem

Suzanne Dupuis, Shoshana Hahn-Goldberg, Lisa Meschino, Bobbi Symes, Beverley Pitman, Marcy Cohen, Laura Kadowaki, Annie Arnoldsen Petersen and Lotte Kragh.