Senior activities

The Harford County Office on Aging boasts seven senior centers and dozens of popular programs.

As part of an effort required by the federal government as a condition of continuing to receive federal money, the county is devising a four-year plan with a variety of goals in mind, all of which essentially relate to better serving the 60-plus crowd in Harford County.

The areas of focus for the new plan are:

• Implementing the Maryland Access Point (information and referral network) to broaden access to services for senior adults and those with disabilities;

• Building a collaborative Network of innovative programming to promote the health and well-being of seniors and vulnerable adults through collaboration, awareness and education;

• Increasing the overall usage of web-based applications and credit card availability to improve efficiency and quality of care;

• Expanding and refining health promotion and wellness programming in senior centers;

• Coordinating with community partners to improve the overall quality of life for seniors, their families and caregivers.

To the end of devising a meaningful plan, the county is soliciting comments on a branch of its website, http://harfordcountymd.spigit.com/Page/Home.

It's a nice way to take advantage of new technology to get some ideas from the potential pool of people being served, and it's potentially an efficient one as the deadline for public comment on the web page closes at 5 p.m. Sept. 16.

Still, it might behoove the county's office on aging to go a little beyond this effort to get more public comments on the matter at hand. While we've all become increasingly computer literate in recent years, a substantial portion of the group of people served by the office on aging are those most likely to be least up to snuff on computers. This isn't to say there aren't plenty of computer savvy seniors out there. Still, the reality that a fair number of seniors out there aren't as computer oriented as their children seems to indicate it would be a good idea to reach out to seniors who might not be so fond of the Internet for ideas about how to best serve them.

Maybe a little more user-friendly, non-electronic outreach is called for in this case.