Developing an integrated age-friendly region within the area of the Ipoly-Völgye EGTC

The territory covered by the Ipoly-Völgye EGTC is characterised by peripheral, scattered settlements with a shrinking and quickly ageing population. A major sectoral problem is that public services do not provide all older people with the assistance they need especially when it comes to accessibility to regular and quality healthcare provision or fresh and nutritious food. Furthemore, the elderly are easily left out of the community process and the labour market is not prepared for their employment, leading to isolation and loss of self-sufficiency. Consequently, the complex care for the elderly (raising as much as 23% threshold in many affected settlements) is putting a bigger and bigger burden on the small municipalities and the - often missing - social care providers.
To adequately answer these challenges, innovative solutions, widespread partnerships and cross-border service integration are needed which are exactly in the heart of this project. The elderly care platform will unite all the relevant stakeholders from the EGTC’s territory (municipalities, service providers, churches and social NGOs) in order to launch the cross-border knowledge transfer as well as the transboundary public service integration. Thanks to the platform’s work a multifold strategic vision will be drafted comprising topics such as  institutional cooperation, elderly employment and cross-border regional integration of public catering. The document will be discussed and disseminated in several workshops and trainings. Furthermore, the project also takes the first steps towards these theoretical goals by procuring two minibuses with which the elderly living in the EGTC’s member settlements can regularly travel to the closest healthcare provider for quality treatments and to rehabilitation community events. Municipal kitchen development also realised in the project will allow for 15 public kitchens to provide a more extensive and improved food service from which the elderly can benefit from.