As governments adapt to ‘active ageing’ policies, care services are increasingly oriented towards helping older adults to stay active in order to maintain their physiological and cognitive capacity. Day centres for the frail old adults are adding more planned activities to their conventional social programmes. Although evidence indicates that they may benefit from physical fitness sessions and brain training, little is known about the way in which the activation agenda influences social interaction among participants. The article aims to fill this knowledge gap by exploring how staff and participants manoeuvre between the new activation agenda and processes of coming to terms with the functional decline of ageing bodies. We draw on ethnographic data, collected in four day centres in Denmark and Norway, constituting participant observation of 18 days, 19 interviews with older participants and 18 interviews with staff members. With reference to the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman, we demonstrate how different fitness identities are negotiated on different social stages. Firstly, we identify a social stage at a crossroad between staff acting as motivators in training sessions and older participants as active contributors. We demonstrate how day-care staff assist participants in keeping up appearances as fit for one's age by recognising their performance and concealing flawed performances. Secondly, we identify a social stage where participants socialise with co-participants around the lunch table and other social events. Here the act of ‘keeping up appearances’ turns into a complex art whereby people strive to retain their fitness identity by comparing themselves with peers. Finally, based on observation ‘backstage’, we reveal how participants distance themselves from the functional decline of old age by claiming that they are fit enough. We conclude that day centres are contested sites for active-ageing policies.

With a policy shift towards personalisation of adult social care in England, much attention has focused on individualised support for older people with care needs. This article reports the findings of a scoping review of United Kingdom (UK) and non-UK literature, published in English from 2005 to 2017, about day centres for older people without dementia and highlights the gaps in evidence. This review, undertaken to inform new empirical research, covered the perceptions, benefits and purposes of day centres. Searches, undertaken in October/November 2014 and updated in August 2017, of electronic databases, libraries, websites, research repositories and journals, identified 77 relevant papers, mostly non-UK. Day centres were found to play a variety of roles for individuals and in care systems. The largest body of evidence concerned social and preventive outcomes. Centre attendance and participation in interventions within them impacted positively on older people's mental health, social contacts, physical function and quality of life. Evidence about outcomes is mainly non-UK. Day centres for older people without dementia are under-researched generally, particularly in the UK. In addition to not being studied as whole services, there are considerable evidence gaps about how day centres are perceived, their outcomes, what they offer, to whom and their wider stakeholders, including family carers, volunteers, staff and professionals who are funding, recommending or referring older people to them.

The paper reports on a study carried out in 1990 for the Department of Health looking at the development of local authority multi-purpose residential homes for elderly people in England and Wales. A national survey showed that one in five public sector residential homes for elderly people would soon be multi-purpose. This proportion could be expected to increase in the 1990S. Many of these homes had become the centre for virtually all the community support services for elderly people in the neighbourhood. Despite some obvious management advantages in making use of residential home facilities for older people in the community, there have to be serious reservations about a multi-purpose model. Case studies in six multi-purpose homes suggest that residents themselves may gain little or nothing from this arrangement. Few interact with elderly people from the neighbourhood in the day centre. So much activity on the premises meant that invasions of residents' privacy and space were common.