The postman is a social worker. “Care for my parents” service
There are fewer and fewer letters to be distributed, but there are more and more seniors who need care and company. Some companies know how to combine it.
Anyone who has watched the French comedy “Even Farther Than Midnight” knows how popular postmen are in France – especially in small towns. Daily visits create strong bonds and trust. Some seniors go a long time without seeing anyone other than their pen pal.
Similarly to Poland, there are fewer and fewer letters to be distributed in France. The French post office put two and two together and, in consultation with postmen, proposed a solution: monitoring and checking the well-being of seniors.
The postman takes care of seniors. Hotline and reports
Yves Lecouturier, a former postal worker who ran the postal museum in Caen in Normandy, believes that the social bond between postmen and postwomen and the French has always existed. “In the late 1970s we were delivering parcels from Monday to Saturday and I remember some elderly people in remote rural towns subscribing to the daily newspaper just to have the postman deliver it – that was the only person they saw,” he recalled in The Guardian.
La Poste, the French post office, instead of closing down branches as in Poland, offered help in 2025. A new ‘Care for my parents’ service, in which children pay postal workers to check on the health of their parents and relatives, has been hailed in France as a ‘clever solution to today’s loneliness epidemic’.
Children living in large cities pay from EUR 20 a month (about PLN 87) for visits by postal workers to their parents or relatives who live alone. Visits can be weekly or more frequent, and end with a report provided to the family and the option of a 24-hour hotline and notification system.
One year after the idea was implemented, approximately 6,000 people use this service. seniors – their average age is 82 years. The oldest person is 98 years old.
Seniors taken care of by postmen. Even photographically
Eric Baudrillard, responsible for developing the new strategy at the French post office, explained in The Guardian: “No other post office in the world has done what we do for the elderly. We are pioneers in this field. People are living longer and more of them want to stay in their homes as long as possible. We know that the need for this type of social connections will grow as mobility increases and adult children move away from their aging parents. Despite all the digital tools available, there is still a need interpersonal contacts.”
The range of services is very wide. Postal workers in France can deliver shopping, basic prescriptions, library books and hot meals to elderly customers, which are financed by local authorities.
La Poste has also started offering a service that regularly delivers printed photos and messages from relatives to older people, which it described as “a kind of Facebook on paper.”
In Poland, seniors have contact with the post office when paying for an RTV subscription or when collecting a pension from the postman.
