Tackling health challenges for aging population
Photo: Reuters
Shrinking fertility rates and longer lives are changing the demographic landscape of countries worldwide, challenging not only the way we think about how to fund care for older people, but attitudes to ageing itself. A recent report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council stating that the 60-years-and-plus population is the fastest growing of all demographic segments. The report states that by 2050 one in five people will join their ranks and that the 60-years-and-plus group will number around one billion by the end of the decade. While we tend to think of shrinking birth rates and ageing populations as mainly an issue for high-income countries, this demographic shift is now being felt most acutely in developing countries, particularly in Asia, where more than half of the world's over-60s (400 million) currently reside. The increasingly large number of older people — aged 60 years and plus — is thus dependent on a proportionately shrinking resource, that is on younger people and, in particular, younger relatives. Given the importance of family for providing or helping with long-term care for the elderly, and the fact that as a resource this is rapidly shrinking, what can governments do to avoid a catastrophic break-down in elder care in the coming decades? What is needed is a fundamental rethinking of our attitudes to older people, particularly the notion that older people constitute a social burden. Active ageing is not just about physical activity and health care, but includes continuing participation in social, economic, cultural and civic affairs. To achieve these things countries will have to do a great deal more than merely encourage people to get on their bikes or go to the gym: to become a reality active ageing requires a wholesale rethinking of the role of old people in society. Bit older people want to continue to participate. Sticking to these outdated ideas of ageing is limiting our ability to create the types of lives we may want to live in the 21st century. But however active and healthy people can remain after 60, there comes a point where older people start to become frail and lose autonomy. Some kind of care system has to be in place and that system has to be funded. Where cognitive impairment is part of a person's declining health, the need for care and funding becomes acute. It appears that certain aging disease like dementia is likely to be a huge problem in the future, particularly for low and middle-income countries which, by 2050 are forecast to be home to around 75 percent of people living with dementia. So ageing presents some formidable challenges, particularly with regard to the way we end our lives, but for experts it would be a mistake to let the last years define the issue as a whole.
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