Sheila Mahon: I was brought up to look after people
A trustee at Ilkley & District Good Neighbours, on a life spent working with older people ...
Sheila Mahon, 82, a trustee at Ilkley & District Good Neighbours, recently completed 50 laps around Ilkley Tarn to raise money for the charity, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. We caught up with her recently to hear more about her life and her work with older people. This piece, the eagle-eyed among you may have recognised, was inspired by the Guardian’s long-running this much I know series.
I was a radiographer for 32 years and I loved it. I chose radiotherapy because as a diagnostic radiographer, you just see patients once, but with radiotherapy you see them over a period of time. And that means you can build a relationship with them, which I liked doing.
Later I got a job at a charity working with older people. I must have been doing something right because in 1994, I was asked by Leeds’ social services to set up another charity for older people. It was called Bramley Elderly Action and it's still going to this day.
I did that job for 15 years. It was wonderful. If I could have afforded to have done it voluntarily, I would have. Because I enjoyed it so much and it was such a pleasure. It was also important. We were able to identify the needs of older people in the area and tackle those needs. The main issues were access to benefits, transport, loneliness and isolation.
I was in my 50s when I started doing it. I was thinking more about getting older and I wanted older people to have opportunities to do things, whether they had given up doing something they enjoyed or trying something new. There are a lot of challenges, of course, like funding, but I felt that my whole life had led to doing that job.
I was always brought up to look after people. My mum and dad were Methodists and brought me up in the Methodist Church. They looked after people and they sort of impressed that way of thinking on me.
I saw an advert saying that Ilkley & District Good Neighbours needed trustees. It was a similar charity to the one in Bramley, so I knew I would be a good fit. I met with the chairman and said I’d done this work before and that I understood all the challenges they faced as I’d experienced them myself in Bramley. He said I was just what they needed. And that’s how I came to be a trustee. It’s a really wonderful organisation.
The most worrying thing for me is how we are dealing with – in fact, not dealing with – people with dementia. Ilkley & District Good Neighbours has just employed somebody to run its dementia hub. She works in the library and she's got a waiting list of people needing to see her.
The thing that I would say people are being let down on in particular is how long it takes them to get a diagnosis. Until you get that diagnosis, you can't get any medication – and there is medication for early dementia – you don't know where to go to get help of any kind. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in this area.
What I would like is for care to be taken back by the central government and for them to look at integrated care. Now that's another thing that happened in Leeds. We all had training in integrated care and I know now that they have offices in Leeds which are integrated health and social care. And the voluntary sector has access to those offices, so we've worked alongside them all the way through. So it's not impossible to do this. And it makes such sense.
Ilkley & District Good Neighbours turned 50 this year. To mark this milestone we’re doing a lot of fundraising linked to the number 50 (between July 2024 and July 2025), hence why I walked around Ilkley Tarn 50 times last month! Other trustees have now said they're going to do things associated with 50. Somebody's going to do a 50-kilometre swim, a 50-kilometre run, and we’re looking to get 50 people taking a splash in White Wells.
As you get older, there are all sorts of things that are not easy to do. Trying to enable more people to maintain their independence as they get older is therefore very important. Losing your independence is a really big thing. If I lost mine, well, I’d be devastated. It's about dignity. It’s about having a voice.
We owe older people more respect than they get. If you look at other parts of the world, elders are looked up to, yet, to us, it sometimes seems like respect is lacking. That needs to change. And when I talk about respect, it’s also about recognising that for a lot of older people, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to do things if they don’t have a computer or if they’re not that comfortable using a smartphone. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were telling me a story about how they were trying to book a holiday and the hotel said that they no longer took payment by card and that she had to do it online. She didn’t have a computer. It’s all very anti-age.
I really want to just keep on helping Ilkley & District Good Neighbours. We really need more people to donate money and fundraise to keep this valuable organisation going for another 50 years. The work it does is really important.
If you’d like to make a donation to Sheila, tap on the link here. To donate directly to Ilkley & District Good Neighbours, you can do that here.