Housing and our health and wellbeing: Healthy ageing webinars

We share the Government’s Ageing Society Grand Challenge goal of closing the gap in healthy life expectancy between richest and poorest. Good quality, well-designed homes and communities can contribute to this goal and help people remain healthy, active and independent in later life.

Poorly designed or maintained housing can contribute to and exacerbate many long-term health conditions. The problem is particularly acute in the private-rented sector but also affects owner-occupiers who are on low incomes. In this webinar we'll explore the question: how can we identify and support people whose health is at risk or is being impacted by poor housing to access funds to repair and improve their homes?

• Chair: Dr Alison Giles, Associate Director for Healthy ageing, Centre for Ageing Better
• Millie Brown, Evidence Officer, Centre for Ageing Better
• Safia Iqbal, Healthy Housing Manager, Derby City Council
• Steph Smith, Humberside Fire and Rescue Service

The UN's Decade on Healthy Ageing launches this year marking a decade of global action to improve the lives of older people, their families, and the communities in which they live. The Consensus Statement on Healthy Ageing, published by Ageing Better and Public Health England sets out a shared vision for making England the best place in the world to grow old. Signatories span the areas of health, employment, housing and communities, and are from academia, local government, the NHS, and the public and voluntary sectors. To date we have over 100 organisations signed up to the Statement’s five principles, which are:

1. Putting prevention first and ensuring timely access to services and support when needed
2. Removing barriers and creating more opportunities for older adults to contribute to society
3. Ensuring good homes and communities
4. Narrowing inequalities
5. Challenging ageist and negative language, culture and practices

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the Statement’s five principles into sharp relief. We want to support signatories to go further and faster and take meaningful action to promote healthy ageing and tackle inequalities. 

In collaboration with Public Health England, we are running a series of webinars that explores each of the Statement’s five principles, the implications of the COVID pandemic, the key issues and lessons learned, followed by presentations from organisations that have implemented actions to address healthy ageing. Members of the UK Network of Age-friendly Communities will add local perspectives to the discussions.

Watch the previous events in the series

• Tackling ageism
• Community contributions
• Health inequalities
• Preventing the preventable

All our webinars are available to watch on-demand on our YouTube channel.