The prime minister has put forward his bold proposal for a universal, NHS-style social care service. In doing so, Andy Burnham has put the spotlight back on one of the major challenges facing almost everywhere in the world: how to manage the demographic changes linked to an ageing society. It’s an important discussion.
But what if government didn’t just look at how to care for people in their later years and instead spent real political capital on policies to help people live longer independently, and in good health? The data isn’t pretty on this. While the trend over the past half-century in almost all countries has been for people to live longer, healthy life expectancy has been consistently falling.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2022-24, healthy life expectancy at birth was just 60.7 years for men (77% of life) and 60.9 years for women (73%) across the UK, despite life expectancy being 79.1 years for men and 83.0 years for women. In Scotland it is even worse: for 2022-24, healthy life expectancy at birth was 59.1 for men and 59.4 for women, numbers that continue to decline. The data points to a major problem in ageing societies: that a growing number of the years we have gained in life expectancy are being spent with reduced independence, limited health conditions or in disability.
This has huge ramifications for social care. Without anything changing in these trends, more older people in poor health means more people dependent on their loved ones, the private sector and the state for care – and a higher burden on an already struggling NHS. As a public health expert, my question is: how much of this shift is preventable?
We know there is enormous variation in how people age. Some of it is down to luck, but it is also about staying active and socially connected to a community, and about larger social policies. For me, a key UK government planning objective, across all sectors, should be to increase the number of healthy years of life.
Healthy ageing is largely about what happens in our 40s, 50s and 60s. It’s about effective prevention and early management of conditions such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer. It’s about our diet, as well as the regular movement of the muscles we need to stay functionally independent each day – to be able to take stairs, go out to the shops, use the toilet or take a shower.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
