United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing: 2021-2030

"To foster healthy ageing and improve the lives of older people and their families and communities, fundamental shifts will be required not only in the actions we take but in how we think about age and ageing." (WHO)

Four areas of action are addressed: combatting ageism, creating age-friendly environments, ensuring integrated care and long-term care. 

Ageism:

Ageism affects how we think, feel and act towards others and ourselves based on age. It imposes powerful barriers to the development of good policies and programmes for older and younger people, and has profound negative consequences on older adults’ health and well-being. WHO is working together with key partners on a Global Campaign to Combat Ageism—an initiative supported by WHO's 194 Member States. The Campaign aims to change the narrative around age and ageing and help create a world for all ages. (liteerally via)

Age-friendly environments: 

Health and well-being are determined not only by our genes and personal characteristics but also by the physical and social environments in which we live our lives. Environments play an important role in determining our physical and mental capacity across a person’s life course and into older age and also how well we adjust to loss of function and other forms of adversity that we may experience at different stages of life, and in particular in later years. Both older people and the environments in which they live are diverse, dynamic and changing. In interaction with each other they hold incredible potential for enabling or constraining Healthy Ageing. (literally via)

Integrated care:

Older people require non-discriminatory access to good-quality essential health services that include prevention, promotion, curative, rehabilitative, palliative and end-of-life care, safe, affordable, effective, good-quality essential medicines and vaccines, dental care and health and assistive technologies, while ensuring that use of these services does not cause the user financial hardship. (literally via)

Long-term care 

Older people continue to have aspirations to well-being and respect regardless of declines in physical and mental capacity. Long-term-care systems enable older people, who experience significant declines in capacity, to receive the care and support that allow them to live a life consistent with their basic rights, fundamental freedoms and human dignity. These services can also help reduce the inappropriate use of acute health-care services, help families avoid catastrophic care expenditures and free women – usually the main caregivers – to have broader social roles. While global data on the need and unmet need for long-term care do not exist, national-level data reveal large gaps in the provision of and access to such services in many low- and middle-income countries. (literally via)

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photograph by Gundula Schulze Eldowy via