Session abstract: An audit of a local diverse community for safe routes to age in place

Significance: Physical and cognitive limitations often accompany aging, increasing the importance of a safe and supportive environment to help older adults maintain mobility. Neighborhood design and maintenance must be evaluated to promote physical activity, mobility, safety, and ultimately health. Audit tools, GIS data and resident interviews are used for this purpose, but often fail to provide information that can be translated to practice. Methods: This presentation focuses on Safe Routes to Age in Place, part of a larger Miami-Dade Age-Friendly Initiative to create a metropolitan area that fosters a healthy environment for diverse adults of all ages and abilities. Safe Routes employs a toolkit based on the 5-E (education, engineering, enforcement, encouragement, and evaluation) model providing practical resources to guide stakeholders in meeting the needs of the community. This presentation will describe preliminary findings using the Centers for Disease Control - Healthy Aging Research Network (CDC-HAN) Audit Tool to assess environmental walkability factors, including: safety, comfort and appeal, accessibility, wayfinding and land use for walking, bicycling, and use of transit, and generating key indicator reports to guide environmental improvements. Results from street segment audits will be shared along with input from adults living in a predominately Hispanic community who accompany team members on audits. Implications: To promote “age-friendly” communities across ages, abilities, and ethnicities, we must understand environmental characteristics from the perspective of older adults and have data to guide community change. Lessons from this initiative will ultimately help inform sound environmental and policy initiatives for other communities.