http://www.openideo.com/open/mayo-clinic//brief.html

Maintaining wellbeing requires maintaining social inclusion

We need to maintain activity as we get older

We need to maintain social ties

Skype may be a good option for the elderly not to be isolated, and not to feel lonely at home

A flat-sharing scheme for the elderly, potentially a website similar to Spareroom for more mature residents

A financial fund to support activities in older age

...

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Looking forward to reading more ideas!

As we discussed on Saturday, one key to maintaining your wellbeing would be to remain active and retain the feeling that you are adding value to society. So may be we should encourage people to "reinvent" themselves as they get older.

As we get older, our skills and capabilities evolve. May be we become a bit less capable physically, but more adept at reflecting and thinking analytically. So an idea is to have a service (may be in a university or an independent service) to analyse skills/strengths and weaknesses and direct people to activities where they will be most productive. This would not necessarily only apply to the elderly, it could be a lifelong evolution. We could call it something like : Lifelong wellbeing .

OR it could be a service offered by the Mayo clinic to their patients

I really love your idea, I think it's great to have a service that is tailored to a specific person's needs and that also takes into account what they can offer. But I imagine that implementation of such a centre would be quite complicated? What if you build a centre and recruit different people and then nobody turns up? what if people are put off by the idea of going back to school? how would you fund it?

I'm just going to play on your idea to see what comes up:

- What if we organised open evenings that are facilitated by experienced life coaches/doctors/lifestyle specialists/ financial advisers...

- May be these professionals can sit in multiple "stations" and people can go from one station to another and have an audit

-After the audit, they can set up a plan for their well-being

Another idea is to have a "speed networking event" where people from all walks of life can gather and find out what they have in common and what they can do for each other?

What if these "well-being centres" centres were "mobile"?

e.g. a van will drive to different places at specific times of the year and people can drop by for an MOT

What if they were "pop- up" shops?

We could construct a "life MOT"/questionaire by contacting several experts and asking them for their expertise

It would be quite easy to do and people are usually happy to contribute their knowledge.

Then we could then test the idea on our friends and their relatives

If that goes well, we could do a pop up clinic/shop somewhere in London and tweak

An institution like the Mayo clinic (challenge sponsor) could easily implement this with not much cost

The major question would be : How do you measure success?

thanks for taking the time to read the concept. I initially thought of a school, though i realise its more like a job centre but the focus is more on life than just jobs or courses. The candidate is a person who finds something missing about their life and is unable to get help. Whether its feeling lonely, or feel the need to carry on applying their skills after retirement or picking up a new hobbie or even getting over social or health problems. Its like going to your doctor but for different aspects of your wellbeing and not just for your health.

there are of course financial or resource problems associate with it. You would need a whole team to deal with one person. Wellbeing encapsulates many things about a person. One solution is to tackle each one seperately and independently, which is happening right now and for years. This wellbeing centre concept is to keep track and help individuals. Like the MOT concept but with staff who are actively helping people look for the thing they want.

in the case of people wanting to be hands on in projects or learn something new, the centre will look at databases of projects or classes who need people. Where there is not, the centre will look at the next best thing or promote a creation of such projects or classes.

Think of the function of a career's advisor and the options to choose from in the meetup website (meetup.om). The advisor or a life coach can look at your predicament, then suggest a group/ class/ programme to attend to. The advisor would suggest something like "how about going to this programme that has people wanting the same thing as you. Lets see, the programme wants a one off membership fee, you (the candidate) said you have enough money to undertake hobbies. You also said you don't want to travel far from home because...? Well this programme is only about 15min bus away from your house. What do you say?" A feedback discussion can follow after undertaking the suggestion. The candidate might say "i love it, everyone there was nice, i would recommend it" or they could say "hmmm, its not really for me. Its fine but its not what i'm looking for". In the case of the latter, we can suggest something similar or take a different approach.

Many people are happy to undertake things to do to make their life more fulfilling, just some have no direction or confidence to do it. Some especially the elderly might need help. Thats where the centre comes in.

One of the major problem is money. The centre will need to start small. Maybe focus on the social aspects of wellbeing for now. Look at databases such as the OpenUniversity, Yell directory and the meetup website. The centre would probably be a charity funded by mayo clinic =). In terms of the health considerations, there are some local councils who promote health and they themselves advertise it and set up shop outside libraries or parks. Details of where and when can be collected by the centre and the information can be relayed to the appropiate candidate.

I like your open evening event. It can promote the centre's cause and even do the personal discussions right there and then. Your audit idea has the same problem as the problem of getting and funding specialists to do the discussions, but a regular monthly open evenings sounds more feasible. The centre could have people on call like the new 111 NHS line, whereas the monthly open evenings can have specialists like you said. The centre could even suggest one to go to one of these open evenings to get a more in depth look at their problem.

Do you fancy pushing it a bit and trying to submit a concept? I think tomorrow

will be the last day that we can submit so may be we can work on a summary for the "life centre/wellbeing centre"

(may be find a good name to start off with) and submit tomorrow?

What do you think?

Sure, but i want to incoporate the pop-up shop cause its a great start to the centre.

"Well-being centre" says it all for me =). Though i'm open to names

I'm at work but will help with the summary as soon as i get home