This report provides practical information for professionals working with older people about using human rights in their work, and illustrates the relevance of national and international human rights legislation to older people’s issues. This report is the product of research into existing evidence of the human rights issues affecting older people in the UK and their engagement with human rights. The first edition of this report was written in March 2009 to inform the Older People and Human Rights Project (see page 36). This second edition of the report has been updated to reflect factual changes and recent developments.

About the guide:
To provide practical information for professionals working with older people about using human rights in their work.
To illustrate the relevance of national and international human rights legislation to older people’s issues.
To provide a summary of existing evidence of human rights issues affecting older people in the UK.
To support the implementation of the Older People and Human Rights Project, a three-year partnership project between Age UK and the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR), funded by Comic Relief.
 

Call for partner organisations

The British Institute of Human Rights has been working for a number of years to strengthen health and social care through the use of rights based approaches. As part of a 2-year project looking at human rights and healthcare in the voluntary sector we are aiming to bring together a small group of VCS organisations in each of Birmingham, Liverpool and London areas (a total of 15 - 20 organisations across the three regions). BIHR will work closely with these organizations at a series of joint meetings designed to look at the right to health and at ways of using human rights to strengthen initiatives in health and social care.

You can find out more about the project at this link.

We would like to hear from organisations working on health and social care in these regions and interested in:

• Exploring ways of using human rights to promote better healthcare 
• Linking up with other organisations and sharing good practice, ideas and challenges
• Becoming part of a wider ‘Health and Human Rights’ network after the project end

Main criteria for selection of partner organisations:

• Your organisation works in the London, Liverpool or Birmingham areas
• Health and / or social care forms a substantial part of your organisation’s activities
• You can nominate a coordinator who has the commitment and capacity to attend 4 1-day events and transmit information to others in the organisation
• The work will be supported by the rest of the organisation – ideally by senior management
• An attempt will be made to incorporate human rights into the work of the organisation – in a way not being done already
• You will feed back on successes / difficulties to BIHR and allow us to share key ideas with other organisations in the network.

This brochure contains details of the activities carried out during the first year of our human rights in the community project.

Report from Human Rights and Health and Social Care Learning event, which took place on 26 January 2010. This event was hosted by BIHR and the Department of Health as part of the Human Rights in Healthcare project.