Project 465741

There are well established links between access to transportation and health for older adults. Access to transportation is essential for older adults to connect with family and friends, and to access health care services, recreational opportunities, and other essential goods and services. And yet the current transportation system is not designed to meet the day-to-day needs of the aging population. Transportation problems are one of the most common barriers, after health problems, that prevent older Canadians from participating in more social, recreational, or group activities. United Way Healthy Aging is working closely with the community-based seniors' services sector to bring solutions to seniors' transportation. Through the Better at Home program, United Way Healthy Aging supports a network of over 80 agencies across the province to deliver seniors' transportation services, typically in the form of seniors' shuttles, buses, and volunteer driver programs. One challenge to advancing transportation programming in this sector, and the non-profit sector more generally, is limited capacity to locate, collect, and analyze data which can be used to quantify the scale of problems, inform where efforts should be targeted, and advocate for change. In this fellowship, I will bridge this data gap by analyzing data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging - the largest and longest multi-year study on aging. The results of this project will support United Way Healthy Aging's efforts to deliver effective transportation programming to older adults in the community. This project will also support larger strategic goals of provincial and federal health agencies to shift away from hospital-based models of care to community-based models, as community-based models are both cheaper for the health system and what most older adults prefer.