Intimage: Intimacy and Sexual Health amongst Older People in Europe
Principal Investigators:
Researcher:
Funder:
Dr Jane Sixsmith and Dr Martin Power
Ms Elena Vaughan
EU (Erasmus+)
Intimage is an Erasmus+ funded project undertaken in collaboration with education and
training providers across Europe (Visoka sola za zdravstvene vede Slovenji Gradec, Slovenia;
Integra Institut, Institut za razvoj cloveskih virov, Slovenia; ECC Association for
interdisciplinary education and consulting, Austria; Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat
Erlangen, Germany; The University of Sheffield, UK; Universita delle LiberEta del Fvg, Italy
and National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland). The project seeks to raise awareness
amongst health and social care professionals of the importance of intimacy and sexual
health for older people. While people are living longer and older people make up an ever
growing proportion of the population in many European countries, an ageist approach that
views older people as largely asexual is a common feature of many European societies.
More importantly, many older people report that they would like more information from
health and social care professionals, but that they frequently encounter barriers in this area.
Common barriers can include a lack of privacy, gender and/or age differences between a
care provider and the older person and/or reluctance on behalf of the older person to raise
queries. As such barriers suggest, communicating in a positive and empowering manner is
key in such circumstances. With this in mind, the Intimage project is focused on developing
a range of educational and training materials for health and social care professionals. These
will be arranged in units and modules and will be available online. The materials are
designed to facilitate professionals in accessing the most relevant materials, as they will be
able to ‘dip in’ to units when needed, while also being able to build up particular knowledge
and understanding through engaging with all units of a module.
Throughout 2015 work on the project has been on-going. Initially, needs assessments were
completed in a number of countries, so as to identify clearly barriers and opportunities.
Armed with the knowledge from these assessments, the project partners assembled a suite
of unit titles, which were grouped into modules. Work on developing the module materials
has now been completed and the project partners are currently focused on editing and
formatting the materials for embedding in the online platform. Once this is completed,
health and social care professionals will be invited to access the materials and offer
feedback and suggestions for improvement.