Staying Safe Conference

We held this well-attended event with expert partners to highlight the areas that can cause harm to older people, and to look at how these problems can be prevented.

Ashley Martin, Public Health Project Manager at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, spoke about safety in the home, including the interaction between people’s changing health and fitness, and how homes are set up and the potential hazards in many homes.

He was followed by Emma Hammett, founder of First Aid for Life and onlinefirstaid.com. Emma is also one of the founders of Stay Safe for Older People, a website bringing together free safety information for older people from different sources, which launched on 1 October. She spoke about poisoning and its prevention and treatment. There are a lot of potential causes of poisoning in everyday life, including medication and foodstuffs and Emma went over ways to recognize and avoid the risks of many of them.

Our third speaker was Liz Smeed, Consumer Protection Officer for the London Borough of Camden, who introduced the national initiative Friends Against Scams. It supports and encourages people to avoid being victims of fraud. Fraudsters often target older people and falling victim to scams is a threat to people’s safety!

The 70 participants, both individuals and people with local organisations had a lot of questions for the speakers and left with increased awareness of how to stay safe themselves and support others to stay safe.