"We preserve their dignity... obviously they are like little children..." Dilemmas and paradoxes in setting age-friendly practices in the first responders working with older adults.
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The dynamic change in the world around us includes an increasing number of different types of crises that severely and disproportionately affect the older population. These include small-scale crises as well as medium and large-scale environmentaly driven, natural disasters and pandemics. As part of our project to promote greater age-friendliness of services provided by the integrated emergency system (first responders), we spoke to a range of professionals about what support they themselves would need to provide better protection for seniors. However, through a thematic analysis with elements of systems thinking, we also identified several dilemmas and paradoxes that recurred during the focus group interviews, which not only led to the identification of possible changes needed in strengthening age-informed and age-friendly approaches in different types of crises where older people are in a position of vulnerability, but also identified deeply rooted ageism and stereotypes. In this paper, we present these results as a basis for discussing not only about the empirical findings but also about the methodological challenges of researching the topic of ageing in these specific occupational groups. Focus groups were conducted from January to February 2024 in three cities of the Czech Republic with police officers, firefighters, paramedics, soldiers, and municipal crisis managers. The paper is presented as part of the sub-project of the National Institute for Research on Socioeconomic Impacts of Diseases and Systemic Risks SYRI (LX22NPO5101), which deals with interdisciplinary research on society with regard to new social, demographic, environmental and health risks. |
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