Reflection

I have enjoyed creating this blog and hope it has been helpful to anyone who reads it. I really enjoyed learning about how quickly the older population is growing and how occupational therapists can use meaningful occupations with them to help prevent them becoming ill. I hope people will be able to see that older people enjoy being active in retirement and that being active is actually often better for a persons' health! In this blog I have covered information on the ageing population, meaningful occupation, succesful ageing, retirement and older people seeking more active lives during retirement.

Photo retrieved from: tycgiddings.yolasite.com

On reflection I can now see our older population is increasing very quickly and as a future health professional I must be aware of this as I will be coming into contact with older people more often because of this. I have also found that learning about older peoples' varying needs and values will become more important to our profession as they grew up in a different time to me and may have different views and values. However in saying this I have drawn my greatest learning from the fact that older people can benefit from being involved in activities and that more and more older people are choosing to be active once retired. The satisfaction and social inclusion older people feel from being engaged in occupation I feel is something than can be overlooked as older people can often be left to their own devices in retirement homes or their own homes. I can see that occupational therapists have a simple but effective intervention in meaningful occupation. The benefits of inclusion of meaningful occcupations into the lives of older people include social, physical and cognitive benefits which are all positive results of this intervention. Due to it being a client-centred and meaningful approach I feel it can continue to be used with older people to give them a fulfilling and inclusive retirement and give older people the opportunity to age successfully!