Preventing the preventable: Healthy ageing webinars

Being in poor health or living with a disabling health condition are not inevitable consequences of ageing. However, both how long people live and how many of those years are spent in good health varies hugely across the country. This inequality is strongly associated with levels of wealth. A person born today into a disadvantaged household in England may only spend 53 years of their life in good health, free from a disability. For someone born into an advantaged household, this number rockets to 70 years.

To support people to stay healthier for longer and to increase disability-free life expectancy, we need to prevent or delay the onset of common causes of disability in mid and later life. And when they do occur, we need to slow their progression and reduce their impact by making them less debilitating.

We share the Government’s Ageing Society Grand Challenge goal of closing the gap in healthy life expectancy. There are many factors contributing to this gap, as described in our Healthy Ageing Consensus Statement. This webinar examined why a focus on prevention across the life course and across the health and social care system is essential to promote healthy ageing.

• Chair: Dr Alison Giles, Associate Director for Healthy ageing, Centre for Ageing Better

• Paul McGarry, Head of Greater Manchester Ageing Hub

• Ewan King, Deputy Chief Executive, Social Care Institute for Excellence

• Greg Fell, Director of Public Health, Sheffield

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

All our events are recorded and are available to watch on-demand on our YouTube channel.