Digital and Phone Services — Looking back, looking forward.

As face-to-face activities continued to be limited, the social connections provided by our telephone friendship services have been more crucial than ever. We look back at some of our highlights from the year.

Coronavirus restrictions have made 2021 another challenging year. Over the year friends up and down the UK have spent thousands of hours together on the phone. Thanks to our volunteers, we have supported 521 older people through one-to-one telephone friendships and 165 through our telephone groups. The Digital and Phone Services team has also supported many older people to connect with other organisations, such as local walking groups and organisations offering bereavement counselling and legal support.

At the beginning of the year, we partnered with OnHand, an app-based volunteer service. OnHand has not only provided telephone friendship to older people who we didn’t have capacity to support directly, but also helped older people who were shielding with tasks like grocery shopping.

In March, we welcomed Emily Groves, our Digital and Phone Services Manager, to the team. Emily is working hard to steer the team in some exciting new directions for 2022. In April we were joined by Louise Rumble, our new Digital and Phone Services Assistant. Louise has developed quickly in her role, signposting older people to other services, facilitating group calls and managing the many queries received by the team.

It has been an exciting year for our telephone groups. When Ash, one of our facilitators, got married in September, his group members joined the nuptials by video link. The lockdown last year meant that a Selsdon-based crochet group was no longer able to meet at the local library. Independent Age arranged for the members to meet via group telephone calls, facilitated by our colleague Raksha from the Community Services team. In September everyone was finally able to return to meeting face to face.

In 2022 we’ll continue to explore how, over the phone and online, we can best support older people to engage with their communities and interests, and access advice and friendship. We’ll grow our telephone groups to reach more people who might struggle to socialise locally or digitally and will promote the improvement of digital skills. We’ll also be developing new volunteer roles to help us connect older people to vital local services and to achieve their goals.

We couldn’t deliver our services without our volunteers. Thank you for all your hard work and dedication over the year — and we wish you all the best for 2022!