Rock "n" roll care homes for baby boomers Elderly people living at home are thought more likely to become injured and require hospital treatment than those in supervised homes. The year-long commission will examine how to turn institutions widely seen as "places where you go to die" into settings for people to continue to enjoy independence. The commission will look at groups such as Anchor, a housing charity for the elderly which recently opened West Hall, a former stately home in Surrey. The building has been radically redesigned to make life as normal as possible for people as they age. It uses technical ideas such as "memory boxes" on doors and specially textured walls to help dementia sufferers. Other ideas could include transforming blocks of fashionable dockside flats built by speculators in the property boom into communities for older people or bringing services for much younger people, even children, on to the same site to integrate them more closely into communities. "We need to turn them from a place where the curtains are drawn and no one really knows what is going on in them to places of laughter and light," he said. It is about a care system that is fit for the rock and roll generation. He added that, done well, residential care could meet social needs which would not be met by people remaining alone in their own homes. The epidemic that is sweeping this country is loneliness and the rock and roll generation will probably be the loneliest generation ever. So we do need to think about the opportunity that communal living can provide. The desire of older people not to have their lifestyles restricted was highlighted in last year's hit film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which saw a group of pensioners move to India. Mr Burstow said that a widespread belief that people must maintain their independence at all costs has meant that for many the prospect of spending their final days in a nursing home has ceased to be "socially acceptable." A slew of revelations of abuse and a growing financial crisis in the residential care sector have left it unfit for the 21st century and in need of an urgent overhaul, he said. "The baby boomers are currently putting their own parents in to residential care and they are seeing what it is like and in many cases they don't like what they see," he said. The answer lies in whether the basic model of the care home can be reinvented, he added. "The baby-boomer generation has the potential to collapse our National Health Service as they age and begin to become more frail and have more ailments," he said. The question is: how do we create a financially sustainable approach for good care homes and how to we make them socially acceptable.