Riverstone's Remarkable Women
Dr Zoe Wyrko, Wellbeing Director
What is your background, and how did it lead you to redefine retirement living at Riverstone?
I’ve been at Riverstone for five years, and prior to that, I was a doctor working in the NHS. I was a consultant geriatrician, so I’m a specialist trained in the healthcare of older people. My specialism is setting up systems and services to help older people be looked after in the right place for them. During Covid, Riverstone offered me a job. It was the chance to do the things that every doctor wishes they could, that they can’t necessarily with NHS resources. I knew I could come in and make a difference.
Wellbeing is central to the Riverstone Living experience. How do you define it when it comes to later life?
Really, wellbeing is about preventing frailty and helping people understand about what getting older and what ageing means. It’s not about doctors and being ill. It’s about staying as well as possible. The worst will happen, we are not magic. When it does happen, how can you be in the best place to deal with it to give yourself the best chance of recovering? Or, if you can’t recover, make sure that all the support is there for you to continue living your life in the way you want to, at the place you want it to, with agency of your own life. What I’ve done with the wellbeing at Riverstone is really put all of that in place for people. So it’s not in your face, it’s there if you need it. And if you really do need it, it’s there to wrap around you.
International Women’s Day is about empowerment. How does Riverstone support women to feel confident, strong, and independent as they age?
It’s all about knowledge. It’s about understanding yourself. It’s about knowing that some of the things you might always have believed about getting older, about being an older woman aren’t true. Or maybe are no longer true, because the world is changing. We know that there’s an awful lot of misogyny in healthcare. That means women might not understand their bodies, because they’ve never been given that opportunity to do so. It also means that if they access a healthcare practitioner, there may be deliberate or inadvertent misogyny from the practitioner. So we have many doctors we work with to recommend to residents when they need one.
What are some common misconceptions about ageing that you would like to challenge?
That you will get confused and develop dementia, or that you have to become less mobile. Yes, you’re probably not going to be running marathons if you were a runner but that doesn’t mean the automatic default is sitting in your chair. We encourage our residents to exercise however they can. So if you can’t do Pilates standing up then you can do it sitting down. Another myth is that your world needs to shrink as you get older. That’s where Riverstone is brilliant. Even if you need support that may have traditionally caused your world to shrink, you’ve got things to engage with going on downstairs.
What advice would you give to people who want to prioritise their wellbeing as they plan for later life?
That it’s either never too early or too late to start. Get the things that take up brain space out of the way first: finances, housing, sorting out your garden, whether that’s employing someone to help or moving to Riverstone. Then, prioritise yourself. Make sure you’ve got time for yourself. One question I’m often asked is, what’s the best sort of exercise? The best sort of exercise to do is the one that you are going to do and that you enjoy. Have a sense of purpose that’s right for you. So that might be doing your garden. It might be going and volunteering with the charity. It might be taking your next-door neighbour under your wing. Purpose is hugely important.
How do women’s health and wellbeing needs evolve in later life, and why is it important these conversations are being recognised and celebrated?
Women change in different ways to men do throughout life. After puberty, men’s hormones stay more or less where they are for the rest of their lives. Women’s bodies and hormones don’t do that; there are huge fluctuations through life stages. We’re understanding a lot more about hormones now in that they don’t just affect the organs, it’s the brain and the entire body too. It’s important to recognise as things you do in 30s or 40s impact on you in your 80s – you can build bone strength, you can build muscle strength at any time. And I think women’s health and well-being needs also involve generationally too because of different approaches. Our residents already span two or three generations because we have people in their 60s, and we have people in their 90s. These generations all have different health beliefs, different approaches to healthcare, to how they interact with healthcare professionals. None of them are wrong. We need to adapt the right information to the right people. Ultimately, it’s vital to have that knowledge and education to understanding yourself, have agency and feel empowered.
