Aged Care Insite Issue 114 | Oct-Nov 2019 | Page 23

practical living a football club or hobbies. But we also like to belong to family. If you think back to the role of grandparents a few generations ago, it was to look after the children while the parents went out to work, or hunting and gathering. We’ve lost that in modern society. There isn’t that link between children and their grandparents in the same way. One of the things we were attempting to do was to bring children and older people back into that, so those links could be established. This is missing in so many families. In the first episode, we saw that not all of the residents were 100 per cent onboard or fully interacting. Can they still feel the benefits just by being in an area where these things are going on? There are benefits for everyone, even if they’re just watching. It’s probably not a spoiler to say people do get more involved as the show goes on. But this was something we weren’t sure of when it started. We didn’t know how many people would stay the distance, and fortunately all of them do. Although we do lose John in the middle, because he has to go off and have a knee replacement. But to see the joy when he comes back was really amazing, both for the children, but also for the older adults. That’s one thing we didn’t expect in the program: that relationships developed between the older adults as well. These are all people in the same retirement village, yet they hardly knew each other, and there was no relationship between them. When they came together in this project, those relationships developed and continued. I think that was a positive that probably wasn’t thought about at the beginning. Everything was completely spontaneous. There was no scripting in this at all. The only supervision was deciding on what activities the children and older people would do that fitted in with the preschool syllabus. That still had to happen. It was all very spontaneous, and that’s the joy of it. The way the cameras could watch the children and their reactions. And particularly, watching [one of the children] Tyrone, when he’s looking at Brian, who’s very grumpy, and he’s got his eyes shut. You’re going to write about this for a report. Does a produced television show have any effects on the outcomes of a scientific experiment? That’s certainly an issue. However, in this case, there were eight cameras and they were hidden. The children weren’t seeing the producers. There were carers, certainly, from the preschool. There was Fiona, and a couple of her assistants to keep an eye on the kids, take them to the toilet and things like that. But there was no prompting. This was them standing back. Only once or twice, when they’re outside, where the cameras were obvious, do you see the children talking to the cameraman. But other than that, it was all hidden. There might have been a little bit of prompting from the assistants, but not in the way of ‘Why don’t you go and talk to Brian’. No, Tyrone was doing that spontaneously, and I think it’s a lovely part of the program. If you watch it, you’ll see Brian start smiling and opening up, whereas he looked to be in a deep depression just before that. There were some comments from Tyrone’s parents near the start and they say, “He’s a very soft soul.” There is that wonderful empathy. You also see it develop in some of the other children during the show. That’s one of the lovely things, the way the children developed as well in this program. There were benefits to them in terms of confidence and the interactions with others. And it was really good for both, and the development of empathy. A big part of the episode was stressing the importance of the mental stimulation, so that residents aren’t switched off mentally for 20 hours a day. Could we see similar results or better results away from this series with teenagers or uni students interacting with residents, as they might provide more intellectual stimulation? It would be interesting to see how the different age groups work. I suspect it will be very much horses for courses, because there would be some people, some teenagers and uni students, who would interact very well with John, I imagine, who’s very well read and quite educated. However, John would be quite different to, say, Shirley. And she would be different to Maureen, who was a kindergarten teacher in her earlier life. They would all be different. There is something about little ones, though – four and five-year-olds. They’re not judgemental. They just see older people as another person. We’re hoping this might also address some of the issues around ageism. And it would be interesting to see uni students interacting. And we do see it with medical students. When we get them to go speak to older people, they come back and say, “Wow, that was so interesting. He knows so much about this or that.” At other times, they probably just said, “Oh, they’re a couple of old farts.” When they actually get to know them more closely, more intimately, they discover that they’re people too, and they’ve got fantastic experiences. I think it will be lovely to see a little bit more of that developing. What are the potential implications of your study for aged care? I think the implications for aged care are that we’ve now got a clear indication of how you can do it. My one caveat would be to say it’s quite complicated to do with preschool children because you’ve got to do things like police checks and you’ve got transport issues. We’re looking very much at perhaps encouraging playgroups to do their activities in an aged care facility, where there is appropriate space. Then, you’ve got two kinds of intergenerational care, because you’ve got the parents of the little ones there as well. And you don’t have quite the same supervision issues, or the need to do Working with Children Checks, and all the stuff that sits behind these sorts of programs. There are lots of suggestions, I think, that will come out of this show. We have colleagues at Griffith University who’ve done work in this area. I was involved with them some years ago, which is how I got interested in the whole concept. This group have published a lot of their work. They show the business side of this: the costs, the different models. That will be useful for aged care facilities that have to decide what to do. The other thing is, if you’re building a new facility or renovating, think about building a childcare centre or some sort of facility that can be used as one. We need more childcare – we’re hearing that all the time. We need more aged care and particularly the day activities. We don’t want people sitting for 20 hours in their room if there are other things to do. It’s about thinking ahead: “How can we improve what we’re doing now in terms of aged care, in terms of accommodation and the environment?”  ■ * Old People’s Home For 4 Year Olds is available to watch on the ABC’s iview app. agedcareinsite.com.au 21