Since the early 2000s, many Western countries have been implementing reablement programs in older people’s homes and community settings. The ‘reablement philosophy’ refers to helping people with functional and/or cognitive disabilities to do things for themselves rather than having things done for them (by relatives, health professionals, etc.). But despite this straightforward aim, studies indicate that reablement tends to overly focus on improving older people’s physical performance, and the evidence for a positive effect on overall health and well-being is not consistent.
The term creaticide was coined to describe how standardized-testing indicators have become “a deliberate governmental policy to kill the expression of creativity in America’s youth” (cf. Berliner 2012 in Ambrose 2012:78). This has been done to reduce costs and manage complexity but, as a result, it often encourages people to “do bad things to keep that indicator looking good” (ibid.). Using comparative examples from international research, this paper explores how reablement services have fallen into a similar trap with their emphasis on functional ability, economic benchmarks, and efficiency – forms of standardization that suppress older people’s autonomy, engagement with others, and problem-solving in their own lives.
In order to prevent creaticide, the paper calls for ethnographic examinations into the lived experience of health policies and the forms of knowledge exchanged between older people and reablement practitioners. By acknowledging and supporting older people’s creativity – along with their intrinsic motivation and individual priorities – the paper highlights how reablement has the potential to help both aging individuals and societies thrive.


Ambrose, D. (2012). “Battling creaticide: an interview with David C. Berliner” in Roeper Review 34(2): 77–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2012.660680

Berliner, D.C. (2012). “Narrowing curriculum, assessments, and conceptions of what it means to be smart in the US schools: creaticide by design” in D. Ambrose & R.J. Sternberg (eds.), How Dogmatic Beliefs Harm Creativity and Higher-Level Thinking (pp. 79–93). New York, NY: Routledge.