Healthy Ageing: Welcome to “The Decade”

28 Sept

In December 2020, a pretty cool thing happened. The United Nations endorsed a global initiative intended to change the way we think, feel and act towards age and ageing. They labelled it The UN Decade of Healthy Ageing 2021-2030…or The Decade for short.

The Decade is an initiative set against the reality of an ageing global population.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), just over 1 billion people were aged 60 years+ in 2020. By 2050 that’s projected to increase to 2.1 billion. That’s an increase of more than 100% in just 30 years. A huge demographic change, with socio-economic impacts that will be felt around the globe.

What is Healthy Ageing?

According to the WHO’s Baseline Report (2020), healthy ageing is “the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age”. This wording is important because it doesn’t focus exclusively on a person’s disease or impairment status.

Defining healthy ageing in this way means that, even if I’m living with diabetes or osteoarthritis, I can still age in a healthy way.

This makes healthy ageing holistic. It challenges us to think about opportunities that can help us be who we want to be and do what we personally value. It recognises that a challenging health condition can be far less challenging when it’s well managed, and when the management of that condition – by self or others – happens within an enabling environment.

Ageing is what we do!

Stopping or slowing the ageing process has been a human preoccupation for centuries. According to biogerantologists (who study the biology of ageing), increases in life expectancy have emerged from improved social, medical and environmental conditions… NOT come from technologies that alter ageing itself.

As it happens, evolutionary biologists have argued that there is never likely to be technology that can alter the ageing process. Naturally this would be terrible news for anyone who is holding out for such technology and hoping that cryogenic freezing will wake them up at just the right time and place to secure eternal living!

We’re all in it together

This makes The Decade relevant to all of us because we’re all ageing, and we’re all doing it at a rate that’s unlikely to change. Sure, you might not have lived for 60-odd years yet but that’s the direction you’re headed!

So, welcome to The Decade of Healthy Ageing. It’s a chance to understand more about what enables well-being in older age, something the WHO are keen to help with!

Key actions of The Decade

The WHO has identified four key actions for The Decade:

1. To change attitudes towards age and ageing – to break down stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination towards people based on their age;

2. To help communities find better ways to enhance the abilities of older people – to help them meet basic needs, learn and grow, be mobile, maintain relationships and contribute to society;

3. To better align care and health services to the needs of older people – to develop integrated services focused on helping older adults to function well physically, mentally and socially;

4. To provide access to long term care for older adults who need it – to make available age-friendly environments to ensure people age safely and keep developing personally.

Not just for the oldies

Like many global initiatives, it’s highly ambitious and there’s a lot more to know. But I find it a compelling undertaking because it makes the creation of a “fully functioning person” (to borrow Carl Rogers’ term) the life-long responsibility of governments, health agencies and communities, not just individuals themselves.

But it doesn’t just involve older adults – everyone has a part to play. Those contributions might be small, like relaxing our age-related stereotypes, or simply listening more to the older people in our lives. Or, they could be much bigger, like empowering older people to speak up about the issues that affect them or lobbying governments and health agencies for improved aged care.

My point of involvement

As for me, my interest in healthy ageing starts in midlife, anywhere between 35 and 60 years of age. Why? Because many challenges of older adulthood are sown during this productive and intense phase of life. The home-building, career-developing, child-rearing years. A time when we’re usually juggling multiple competing goals but doing so at the expense of ourselves.

Yes, that’s right, midlife has a way of chewing us up and spitting us out! All too often people fall into retirement with little more to give – physically, mentally or socially – and little clue about how to move forward. When this happens, a person’s platform for healthy ageing can best be described as wobbly.

As such, this is where I think I’m best to focus my efforts. Not because I’m ageing perfectly myself, as that’s always a work on progress. Rather it’s because I’ve always felt that life is for the living – regardless how old we are – and because my experience working in psychology and exercise science has convinced me we’ve more potential to live well than we’re able or willing to acknowledge.

So, Welcome to The Decade! There’s some work to be done and I’ll be contributing where I can…all the way through to 2030 and beyond. Ironically, that just happens to be about the time that I’ll officially be regarded as an older adult!

info@drgordonspence.com
(+61) 421 641649