Alex Smith, founder of The Cares Family, says the charity uses social media to find young people like Becky and more traditional methods, including stands at GP surgeries and supermarkets, to identify lonely older people.
"We're calling on health professionals to identify lonely cancer patients and make them aware of the support available so that they don't have to go through their cancer alone".
On Monday Independent Age will call on the government to tackle loneliness among retirees by providing pre-retirement advice on retaining and developing social networks and for local councils to step up efforts to identify lonely people.
This is how scientists identify lonely monkeys – they don't look for the monkey pottering around contentedly by himself; they look for the monkey that hesitantly approaches the crowd then steps back, that makes overtures to groom another, then timidly pulls away.
An initiative we launched, the Togetherness Program, assessed our patient base of more than 80,000 patients and identified 2,000 lonely seniors more than 700 of whom elected to participate in the program and are enrolled in an intensive intervention that includes weekly phone calls, home visits, encouragement, and connection to community-based programs.
French experts have identified that lonely barnacle-encrusted fragment as a "flaperon," a control flap from the wing of a Boeing 777.
Identifying "lonely" patients as more likely candidates for spiritual care helps provide direction to departmental staff members and spiritual caregivers in determining whom to visit in the limit number of available staff hours.
London was identified the loneliest place with a figure of 52% compared with 45% in the south west of England.
One study acknowledged that elderly individuals, who are already experiencing decline in immune function, are more likely to identify as lonely.
Aspects of someone's life, like marital status, size of household, and size of social network (Figure 1) all have a hand in establishing who is more likely to identify as lonely, but much of these data come from surveys and statistical analyses.
And a 2012 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that people who identified themselves as lonely were 59% more likely to lose the ability to perform tasks of daily living and 45% more likely to die early than those who didn't identify as lonely.
