Our Learnings

In September 2021, in partnership with Public Health South Tees, we launched a Middlesbrough-wide age-friendly survey based on WHO’s 8 domains. Launched during our Festival of Ageing Better, the survey aimed to gather as many views of older people as possible to help build a picture of what is happening within the local community and find out what residents’ think can be done to make Middlesbrough a better place to live and age.

The findings of the survey have informed development of this baseline report ‘Middlesbrough: An Age-friendly Town? Where we are now: March 2022’. The report identifies the current state of play according to residents and puts forward some key recommendations for the future of an age-friendly Middlesbrough.

We strived to get beneath the usual processes, of measuring outcomes and outputs, to capture the true voices and experiences of local older people who are lonely or isolated. We knew that counting bums on seats, using evidenced based scales and analysing data was only going to give us half the picture. To ensure that the programme was genuinely responding to local older people, we needed to try as hard as we could to get a full picture.

This report tells the story of what we had learned three years into the six year programme.

This report is based on a review of published material, and research carried out by Teesside University that specifically relates to Ageing Better Middlesbrough. 

The primary research encompassed survey responses, ‘stories of change’, indepth interviews with beneficiaries, and focus group discussions with front-line staff.

This report shares our learning around supporting people over 50 to use digital devices and get online, both pre and during the COVID-19 crisis.

Our learning strongly indicates that there needs to be more flexible and relevant ways for people over 50 to learn digital skills. It is also crucial that the people who are at most risk of remaining digitally excluded have affordable access to devices and an internet connection, otherwise the ‘new normal’ risks further isolating people not digitally included.

Ageing Better Middlesbrough’s digital inclusion offer was delivered by one of our trusted partners, The Hope Foundation.

We've been working to improve the mental health of people in Middlesbrough and Stockton for nearly 25 years. We know our community and our outcomes show that we are improving mental health. Over time, we've learned that mental health and people’s ability to connect with community activity and services are inextricably linked. 

This is why this report is so important. We believe our learning shows what needs to be done to deliver social prescribing in our area for the people who need it most.

Here's our report into the need for social prescribing focusing on our ageing community. 

We're now proud to say that we deliver social prescribing services across 24 GP surgeries supporting over 3,000 local people each year.

We know that weight can have a significant impact on peoples lives both physically and mentally. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified that the burden of diseases associated with unhealthy diets is a worldwide concern, particularly health issues caused by co-existing undernutrition, being overweight and obesity. As we know that weight is a prominent issue in the North East of England, Teesside Mind decided to design a service to support the people in our community to reach and maintain a healthy weight.

An external consultant, four members of staff from Teesside Mind and two Peer Designers formed the service design team working on this project. The aims of the service design team were to:

• Identify the unmet needs of the people in our community around weight management
• Translate this into a service offer

Here's the research report which helped to shape our new Off The Scales service.