The mayor of Santa Cruz, José Manuel Bermúdez, accompanied by the councilor for Social Action, Rosario González, and the councilor for the Southwest district, Javier Rivero, presented the Santa Cruz Vital, promoted by the Bureau for the Elderly of the Municipal Institute of Social Care (IMAS), which is advancing with a new cycle that started last week and incorporates a wide range of free activities, including cultural visits and sports activities, also within the #SantaCruzPuroCorazón program, to promote healthy aging.
Bermúdez highlighted that “this initiative is a program of leisure and training activities for our elders, so that they have things to do and, in addition, that they get to know the different towns, villages and neighborhoods of our city” and argues that “it is it tries to make them carry out activities together and, above all, that they enjoy themselves, because they and they worked all their lives to have a better town, to help their families, to help the city move forward” and concludes that “precisely for this reason now they deserve not to be alone and to be able to carry out4 this whole range of activities”.
For her part, Rosario González reported that “on this occasion, a total of 27 groups have been created distributed in the five districts of the municipality (7, in Ofra-Costa Sur; 6, in Centro-Ifara; 5, in Southwest; 5, in Anaga, and 4, in Salud-La Salle)” and adds that “each of them will receive bi-weekly proposals lasting an hour and a half, oriented, fundamentally, to wellness workshops and other socio-educational activities of therapeutic and healthy leisure that will be taught as a complement” and adds that “in total, 1,687 hours of work will be offered spread over the next 27 weeks”.
González points out that “the Santa Cruz Vital program seeks to ensure that the elderly in the municipality remain in their environment with the highest possible quality of life, promoting their autonomy and independence to fight against unwanted loneliness through proposals that cover the physical part, cognitive, emotional and social” and maintains that “in fact, one of the weekly sessions will be devoted to activities that improve physical fitness, while another will address issues related to mental activation and emotional health”.
The actions seek, above all, to promote the acquisition of healthy habits and routines in our elders, so that, later, they are able to continue these activities autonomously. To achieve this goal, they will be proposed to carry out a task that they must carry out at home during each of the weeks that this new cycle of the Santa Cruz Vital program lasts.
The “Restart your body” activity will promote the improvement of the physical condition of the participants, reducing the impact of lack of exercise and improving the loss of muscle mass. This last aspect is a prevention factor in fractures caused by falls and also favors the autonomy of the elderly. To achieve this, the specialized monitors will work in fields such as resistance, strengthening, balance and flexibility. To do this, activities such as games, music, dance, tai chi, pilates, yoga, walks or sports on the beach will be developed.
The block called “Reset your mind” will pursue, meanwhile, the training of the cognitive functions of the users. It will address improving memory and preventing loss of mental alertness. To do this, the monitors will exercise the different types of memory, stimulating the auditory and visual-perceptive sensory cortex. Aspects such as recent memory, recognition, evocation, reasoning, fluency, comprehension, working memory or simple calculation will be trained. Guidance, literacy, audiobooks or storytelling techniques will also be used.
The last section that will be developed in the workshops is called “Caring for Emotional Health”, which will try to deal with changes in the mood of the elderly through strategies and techniques. The objective here will be to reduce anxiety and stress, while increasing self-esteem, encouraging emotional expression and social interaction.
Conflict resolution and the development of skills and abilities will also be addressed. The specialized monitors will develop relaxation and emotional expression techniques such as laughter therapy, music therapy, theater, body expression, alternative thoughts, humor or the stimulation of communication and dramatization, among others.
In the same way, the Santa Cruz Vital program for this 2022 also contemplates the realization of other activities of a complementary nature, such as training workshops, artistic expression and others of a cultural nature. These include visits to emblematic places of interest in the city (Teatro Guimerá, TEA-Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Casa del Carnaval or Palmetum, among others).
