Planning for Seniors Housing in Changing Cities: Lessons Learned From a Cross-National Exchange

Across North America, a growing number of older adults have a core housing need and lack access to affordable, suitable or adequate housing. Although federal, state/provincial and local backdrops vary across Canadian and American contexts, seniors’ housing providers in both countries face similar challenges and must develop innovative policy and program responses to help older adults age in place. We hosted an international seniors’ housing conference to create a platform for cross-national collaboration among multidisciplinary seniors housing experts. This event offered an opportunity to exchange best practices, emerging research, and policy solutions, and establish a set of shared priorities for advancing seniors housing that were applicable to two nations with different social systems. This paper will reflect on the exchange of knowledge and best practices related to housing preservation, eviction prevention, and access to supports during COVID-19, and the lessons learned fostering a cross-national collaborative network of seniors housing experts.

Supporting Healthy Aging through the Scale-Up, Spread, and Sustainability of Assistive Technology Implementation: A Rapid Realist Review of Participatory Co-Design for Assistive Technology with Older Adults.

Objective: To identify the key mechanisms, contexts, and outcomes that drive the successful participatory co-design of assistive technologies. Method: A rapid realist review was conducted using a systematic search strategy. After screening, a final set of 28 articles were included. Articles were analyzed for evidence relevant to our initial program theory (IPT), and context-mechanism-outcome configurations were developed, resulting in a revised program theory. Results: All 28 articles included were highly relevant to the IPT, and had sufficient detail regarding the process of participatory co-design. The findings of this review highlight several key context-mechanism-outcome configurations as potential patterns in the data under the two dimensions of the evolving program theory: knowledge integration and the ethico-political dimension. Discussion: This review revealed the key mechanisms of mutual awareness, mutual learning, trust, and reciprocity that need to be taken into account in AT development and assessment. We concluded that participatory co-design requires a restructuring of power relations between end-users and those traditionally in control of technology design. These findings inform the development and assessment of AT for older adults and help guide policy/decision-makers to move forward with the now urgent agenda for scale-up and spread, initiated by the burning platform of the COVID-19 pandemic.