In Compass’s 2026 user survey, almost half of respondents were 75 or older. Yet on most forms, everyone above the age of 65 is folded into a single category.
That’s decades of different experiences, needs and capabilities reduced to one tick box.
The new National Prevention Framework for the Abuse and Mistreatment of Older People calls this kind of distance “future-self discontinuity”: we tend to see our older self as someone unfamiliar, somewhere far off. Treating older people as one separate group can make that distance – and the assumptions that come with it – even greater.
The Compass results push back against one of those assumptions. Respondents ranked the website and email newsletter as their preferred ways to receive information, with online resources among the most-used sources of help.
Print, phone and face-to-face services are still essential. But age alone tells us very little about how someone will engage.
Our work across the older people’s rights, advocacy and safety sector keeps bringing us back to the same principle: good communication starts with real people, not a catch-all idea of “65+”.
