The role and competences of health professionals in a new healthy ageing approach

Abstract

Demographic change and health is an important theme all over the world. It is one of the grand societal challenges of the European Union: we have an fast ageing population, people live longer but with more chronic diseases, and the cost of health and social care increase. Solutions are to be found in a combination of prevention, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. Active and healthy ageing gives a fruitful approach to solve the challenges of demographic change and health. In the Netherlands, healthy ageing not only focusses about older people with diseases: we have a life cycle approach, from growing up healthy to growing old. The focus is on functioning and health and participation. We use a new definition of health as the ability to adapt and selfmanage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges. Nurses play an important role in this approach. In the international ELLAN project, a European Core Competence Framework is developed for health and care professionals working with older people. In this framework, assessment performance indicators are specified for each CanMed role. In October 2018 a new book is published, in which from the background of healthy ageing and demographic change, these competences are described. The roles of (geriatric) nursing in this Healthy Ageing approach include: Strengthen selfmanagement and resilience of patients; contribute to prevention and health literacy of citizens; focus on functioning and the ability to adapt and selfmanage and; use interdisciplinary innovative methods in health improvement like health technology. Introduction: The old age of an individual has always been interesting and attractive. That work can be understood as a presentation of the concept of “healthy ageing” but mainly focused on the individual. The concept of an ageing population is a relatively new problem from the historical point of view. It can be observed that in 1950 no country had more than 11 percent of its population aged 65 and over. Looking at the year 2000, the highest was 18 percent. However, the problem will rise dramatically by 2050 when it could reach 38 percent. Projections indicate that in 2050 there will be a larger number of older people aged 60 or over than adolescents aged 10–24. To address this problem, different solar PV modules cooling systems are investigated, developed, and employed. These systems are cooling the PV modules by different methods and techniques. Unfortunately, there is no universal approach to assess the effectiveness of applied cooling techniques. In this paper, a method and criterion for the PV modules’ cooling system effectivity assessment are proposed. Methods: Four independent researchers used combinations of keywords such as healthy ageing and World Health Organization, and found 637 521 articles. After adding specific keywords including long-term integrated care, human resources, research, ageism, economic issues, investment, implementation and age-friendly city the search was limited to studies. The search was also limited to studies of humans and articles written in English. After a careful review of their abstracts, the articles were identified as papers focusing on the researched topic. With this restriction, the search provided the articles and after reading the complete texts, 46 of the most relevant articles were included in this review. Conclusions: The global population is ageing rapidly. These changes highlight the need to adapt person-centred integrated care focusing on the needs of older people and their preferences and guaranteeing access to multiple age-friendly services closely engaged with families and communities. Public health policies should address the diversity of health and functional states experienced by older people and maximize the number of people who achieve positive trajectories of ageing. Integration initiatives need actions at macro-levels (legislation, funding), at meso-levels (age-friendly environment) and at micro-clinical levels. However, few countries have managed to sustainably deliver integrated care for older people and evidence for the effectiveness of integrated care approaches remains inconsistent.