Innovation: Afternoon Foundation helpline

Hungary

AAI Domains:

• Capacity and enabling environment (use of ICT)

• Independent, healthy and secure living (access to health care services, mental well-being)

• Participation in society (voluntary activity, social connectedness)

Social isolation and loneliness can have negative effects on health and well-being. Although it is commonly associated with older people who have retired and experienced health limitations that diminish their social support network, loneliness can affect people of all ages and walks of life. While telephone helplines for older people are becoming increasingly common, they can also have an innovative and valuable role to play for people in the middle years of their life.

The Afternoon Foundation was established in 1998 when the founders, who worked at a telephone helpline service for children and young people, noticed that they were receiving more calls for older people. Older people usually called to talk about their grandchildren’s problems, but many also spoke about their feelings of social isolation and loneliness and felt that they had to keep these issues to themselves as they did not have anybody to talk them over with.

This prompted the establishment of the DélUtán (Afternoon) Foundation and helpline in 1998 with a handful of volunteers given some training in social gerontology and the costs largely met by the founders. The project attracted funding from the Soros Foundation, and other charitable foundations such as the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour alongside the support of Hungarian Telecom, who meet two thirds of the telephone costs and has offered a free to call service available across all of Hungary from 6pm to 9pm every day of the week.

In 2005, it became increasingly apparent that people who had lost their job were also experiencing social isolation, depression and a loss of social support. The helpline aimed to provide support for this group who were experiencing severe difficulties due to low self-esteem, poverty and a loss of social role and status but felt that they had nowhere to turn for help.

The telephone helpline provided accessible and anonymous support for these middle age people, a particularly important issue in rural communities, along with information about what steps people could take to improve their situation. This pioneering work was recognised with the award of Civic Organisation of the Year in 2006 and the expansion for a fixed period of time of the helpline to Hungarian speakers in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia as part of the EU HELPs project.

However, funding from the Ministry stopped in 2009 following the financial crisis and it has been a struggle to generate the €17,000 per year operational costs for the helpline, despite it also offering advice and support on legal and medical matters. Despite these challenges, the Foundation has developed an online forum so that people can access the support service on the internet rather than the telephone and it has also provided training courses for older people in the use of ICT.

In relation to the active ageing index, the helpline enables people to access social support that can address mental well-being. This can provide a nudge towards accessing available psychological health care services or it can simply help to improve health and well-being by having a social connection with somebody who can provide advice and support. The helpline is innovative in taking a whole of life approach to providing social support rather than just being a service for older people and it provides socially useful volunteering opportunities for people to show their solidarity for people experiencing social isolation and loneliness.

DélUtán website