The online club helping inspire a more joyful retirement

The founder of an online activity club providing inspiration for a happier and more fulfilling retirement has told Agetech World she believes a link-up with the NHS could have “huge benefits” for both older people and the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system.

Hannah Thomson was inspired by her late grandmother to launch The Joy Club in December 2020 to help tackle loneliness in retirement and empower older people to make the most of their later years by leading a more physically active and intellectually stimulating life.

The online platform that offers members the chance to connect with others who share their interests, access activities, and take part in expert-led live-streamed classes and talks, already collaborates with several private partners, including retirement villages, and is looking at the potential of working with two leading financial institutions.

But entrepreneur Ms Thomson has told the latest Agetech World podcast that a tie-in between The Joy Club and the NHS could be mutually beneficial.

Click here to listen to the latest Agetech World podcast

Ms Thomson said: “We would love to work with the NHS. At the moment we have our partnerships with the private sector, so we started off focusing on retirement living, particularly integrated retirement communities, and we work with the likes of Audley Villages, BUPA’s retirement village in Richmond Villages, and Anchor – the largest provider of retirement housing in the UK – so we work with amazing providers who really are at the forefront of delivering a health and wellness package that will support prolonged independence of their homeowners.

“Integrated retirement communities are very much focused on delivering a new model to enable people to age in place in a way that extends life expectancy, but importantly a healthy life expectancy as well, having good healthy later years.

Hannah Thomson, founder CEO of The Joy Club

“So that model works really nicely in the private sector, and we think as well it would work really well for the NHS.

“When we look at the stats, loneliness is an interesting way to frame this because I think I am very mindful of contributing to a positive dialogue around healthy ageing.

“I think sometimes loneliness as an issue amongst people in later life can perpetuate negative stereotypes, so I’m very careful when I’m talking about this.

“But it is true to say, that the research would suggest, that a third of people in later life are lonely and that if you are lonely that costs the NHS an extra £12k per person over the 15 years of later life.

“There are huge mental health issues around loneliness, as well as physical health issues. It is twice as harmful as obesity, it is just as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, so there are lots of reasons from patient well-being to system pressure, to system finance, why the NHS should support people in later life to remain active and connected and joyful through The Joy Club.

“We are starting to have a few conversations around that, and we would love that to happen. We think there would be huge benefits.”

Ms Thomson added: “But I think for us there are also enormous opportunities for us elsewhere in the private sector, and we are starting off some proof-of-concept work with Lloyds Banking Group, for example, and we are doing some work with Standard Life.

“These are organisations that have access to millions of people and are under less funding pressure than the NHS as well.

“So, we would be very excited about the NHS opportunity but we can also see huge opportunities in the private sector, including retirement villages, pensions, banking, and financial services, that enable us to have impact of scale.

“And that is what we are really thinking about; how we get The Joy Club in the hands of millions of people as quickly as possible to have that positive impact.”

The inspiration for The Joy Club dates back to 2015 when Ms Thomson witnessed the deterioration of her ‘Granny Jean,’ following a dementia diagnosis.

She sadly passed away just before the first UK Covid lockdown in March 2020. Ms Thomson said it was this experience combined with voluntary work she had been doing with Age UK, that made her realise that as a nation we are not doing enough to support people in later life.

She said that all too often we only treat age-related illness once it has taken hold when instead we should be keeping people well for as long as possible.

Ms Thomson spent months speaking to experts and listening to the concerns of older people before coming up with her idea for the online-based The Joy Club.

Currently only operating in the UK, she acknowledged it’s a concept that can be easily rolled out to other countries, with a US platform likely in the near future.

She said: “For us the UK, the home market, is our focus at the moment, and we have lots of exciting plans in place to extend our presence in the integrated retirement community sector and also then move into other sectors like finance and pensions and banking, so that’s our focus in the short term.

“But certainly, in the medium term, we would be looking to take this elsewhere. The US is likely to be our second market, but ultimately it is our ambition to build the largest and most joyful community of retirees globally.”

She added: “We are continuously involved in the cycle of experimentation, testing, iteration, and as I’ve mentioned, audio is something that we have just launched, and that is going tremendously well, so we will be looking to evolve the platform further, very much based on feedback, extend our reach and impact through partnerships, and then there are international expansions, so lots of exciting things in the pipeline.”