Kathy Greenlee, Administrator and Assistant Secretary for Aging, Administration for Community Living at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, presented on Aging and Disability: The Alliance of the Future, discussing the rationale behind last year’s creation of the Administration for Community Living. She identified the following issues common to aging and disability: Older Americans Act and Developmental Disabilities Act involve advocacy for people’s self-determination; coordination of health care and community resources; functional limitations are not based on age; housing; “transportation, transportation, transportation”; direct care workers; and family caregivers who are the backbone of LTC.
In Long Life in 21st Century, Stanford Center on Longevity Director Laura Carstensen discussed how public health improvements added 30 years to U.S.
Home & Community Based Programs (H&CBP)
In Aging Your Way: Boomers Creating Communities for All (H&CBP), we learned how Senior Services in Seattle
In Beyond the Health Care System: Promoting Health for Individuals and Communities (H&CBP), we learned how Atlanta Regional Commission’s Lifelong Communities Initiative provides a framework for “aging in place” while addressing determinants of health by promoting housing and transportation options, encouraging healthy lifestyles, and expanding information and access to services
In The Live Well Summit: Engaging Older Adults to Solve Pressing Health and Social Issues (H&CBP, Aging 101), San Diego’s Aging and Independence Services (http://www.sdcounty.ca.gov/hhsa/programs/ais/) shared success stories of intergenerational programs like pairing foster youth with affordable senior housing, seniors mentoring youth in work/life skills, college students teaching English and health literacy to immigrant elders, etc. Since 2000, San Diego ’s AIS has employed a full-time intergenerational coordinator and in 2012, Generations United named San Diego
Portland-based Elders in Action’s Age Friendly Program Manager Joan Corella(http://eldersinaction.org/programs/agefriendly/) began Engaging a Community in Making Businesses Age Friendly (Business & Aging) workshop by asking why a business would want to be age-friendly. I responded that it’s like doing business with China
SCAN presented Health Literacy in Action: Developing a Community-Based Health Promotion Program for Seniors (Physical Health & Aging) workshop with tips to improve oral and print communications by adopting a universal precautions approach. Some helpful sites to evaluate readability:
Forget Old Age, It’s Time to Live Long and (Really) Prosper
ReplyDeleteAdvances in health care have added years to our life. According to Laura Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, it’s time we added life to our years
By LAURA CARSTENSEN
Dec. 3, 2015 10:26 a.m. ET
Given the option of a 30-year life extension, who would apply it only to old age? Yet, this is precisely what we’re doing. Life expectancy nearly doubled in the 20th century, with all those extra years tacked on at the end.
Instead of thinking imaginatively about this unprecedented opportunity, we tend to wring our hands at the thought of populations top-heavy with the elderly. Policy makers despair over Social Security, but the idea that we should buckle down and save for 40-year retirements is utterly misguided. The real problem is that our lives are still led according to the norms and social scripts that guided our grandparents. We humans are creatures of culture, and life expectancy increased too fast for culture to keep pace.
Flash forward 30 years: Every fundamental aspect of our lives will change, and none more so than work. We will work many more years but fewer days in a week—reaping cognitive, social and physical benefits in addition to financial gains. Rather than raising children at the peak of our careers, we’ll cycle in and out of full-time and part-time work, allowing parents—finally—to achieve a work-life balance. We’ll pursue multiple careers, and education, instead of stopping in our 20s, will continue throughout life, with intermittent returns to universities, nanodegrees and employer-based training. Gap years, sabbaticals and extended leaves between jobs will become commonplace. Workforces will be more age-diverse than ever before, and the glimmers from research on mixed-age work teams indicate they outperform all others. Matching the speed and flexibility of youth with the experience and stability of age will make work more enjoyable and profitable in the age of longevity. Career arcs will expand early and contract very gradually as we trade income for flexibility and apply well-honed skills to work that matters greatly to us.
Our record-length lives afford us the chance to redesign the way we live, and write a life script for lifetimes that last a century. It won’t be a story about old age—it will be a story about long life.
Laura Carstensen
Laura Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/forget-old-age-its-time-to-live-long-and-really-prosper-1449156361