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This week's National Loneliness Awareness Week (15th-21st of June). It's purpose is to raise awareness of loneliness and encouraging people to recognise and talk openly about their emotions, especially during the unpredictability caused by Covid-19.
Loneliness Awareness Week (LAW), started 4 years ago now and has gradually been gaining more attention and prominence. Last year it was recorded that over 800 events took place during the first launch day, resulting in conversations about loneliness every 5 seconds across the UK – truly amazing!
Loneliness is a perceived mismatch between the quality or quantity of social connections that a person has and what they would like to have – it’s a perfectly normal human emotion and can be a signal that we need more social contact at times. Over 9 million people in the UK say that they are often lonely with the majority being 16-24 year-olds.
With this in mind and the fact that current circumstances mean there are more of us than ever who are likely to be suffering from loneliness right now, we’ve been looking at how Connexus is supporting both colleagues and customers with this.
One way we can help to combat loneliness is by talking about it! Everyone needs different levels of social contact but here are some of our tips for helping yourself and the community:
On-top of initiatives like virtual catch-ups, colleagues have been posting pictures of their workstations, their furry friends (keeping them company), their baking successes (or not!) and their wellbeing walks. Everything we can do to lift the mood.
Just as we want to support our colleagues, we’re committed to supporting our customers too. At the beginning of lockdown we launched our Customer Engagement program, calling all of our 10,000 customers across Shropshire and Herefordshire with the aim to let customers know that our housing and support services were operating as close to usual as possible. Not only did these vital calls help us understand which of our customers needed the most support but we were able to establish those in need of ongoing contact to ensure they didn’t feel lonely during this period of uncertain and isolation.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, the residents at our Independent Living Schemes (sheltered housing) would thrive on everyday contact with our support staff, including using the communal areas for all kinds of social clubs and support groups. During lockdown and with social distancing measures in place the support we offer has had to be adapted to accommodate these but certainly has not been compromised.
Our Independent Living Coordinators soon implemented new ways of working and have been creative with how they keep their residents supported and not feeling lonely. 1,873 calls were made over 5 days to all the residents to ‘check in’ on how they were feeling and helped us address specific support needs for extra follow up calls. Now the coordinators’ use a mixture of telephone and video chats to help maintain the social atmosphere the residents were so used to previously.
