Ms Caroline Walker-Strong:

That is about culture and education as well. We need to make sure that people understand that this faces all of us who have the privilege of getting older. In our opening statement, we asked whether people in this room would want to age into our current system. My answer to that is certainly "No". It goes back to what Ms Donnelly said about the options in between. We need to go back to looking at having more localised services available to people. When people age in place in their own communities, they are known, linked in and can have conversations with people. If a person gets a visitor, they may talk about someone local, so they are included in that. This empowers them to advocate for themselves and to pop down to the shop if they want to. However, what we are seeing at the moment is that once people go into nursing homes, they vanish from their local communities. They may not have transport to get back or they may not have the mobility to access the local town. This diminishes their own voice and their right to self advocate. We need to look at a massive shift in how we do things, with better planning for the future and how our local towns look at zoning areas for there to be housing in the local community, rather than putting large planning applications in on the edges of towns. Our opening statement mentions examining this and looking at how we can get people to advocate for themselves in a much stronger way.