Last week, I had the pleasure of co-hosting the Global Ageing Conference in Glasgow, alongside Scottish Care and Global Ageing Network. As a global gathering of 650 people, there was plenty of perspectives, optimism and passion for the future of care and support. Having had time to reflect on the conference, I’d like to share some initial thoughts.
The global context of ageing
This conference was timely, coming while global societies face ageing population challenges. By 2050, one in six people in the world will be over 65. The number of people over 80 is likely to increase from 143 million in 2019 to 426 million in 2050. Mansur Dalal, Deputy Chair of CommonAge, reminded delegates that ‘senior care is an idea whose time has come’ with millions more people needing care in the coming decades and not just in ‘high-income western countries’.
Indeed, countries like India and the entire continent of Africa, while having much younger populations than western countries, also have rapidly growing older populations and a shortage of care workers. This context must be kept in mind when thinking about national policy development.
International collaboration
We face a crisis in which the highly skilled workforce (domestic or migrants) is not recognised or properly renumerated for their skills by the state, indicating how our society currently regards adult social care. We need to unify to address this injustice. International recruitment to support a global social care workforce needs to be radically rethought in the face of rapidly changing demography.
We, as a global community, need to work together to move away from the ‘extraction’ of staff from lower-income countries that Dr Leon Geffen, Director of the Samson Institute for Ageing Research in Cape Town, referenced in his presentation at the International Workforce Summit. We should use our global influence to build an ethical framework which ensures that people working in care, wherever they are in the world, are valued equally for the work that they do.
A human rights approach
In her keynote address, Claudia Mahler, the United Nations (UN) Independent Expert on the Human Rights of Older Persons, called for the UN to adopt a Convention on Human Rights for older adults to help form a global consensus on a human rights-based approach to social care reform and recruitment which would help deal with the entrenched inequalities that are creating a barrier to meaningful reform.
Changing the story of ageing care
A theme of the conference was the need to rethink how we conceptualise ageing. Sir Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, said our societies don’t like thinking about ageing and see it through a negative lens, which influences how we talk about and perceive social care and how we imagine the future. He posited several ‘shifts’ required to move from this pessimistic vision to one which celebrates people living longer.
These shifts include recognising care is fundamental to the economy, generating jobs and enabling people to live healthier, dignified lives for longer. As people live longer, but work less, they have more time and can often still be involved in the wider economy, and importantly, have fun! This requires a rethink about what it means to be healthy, more focus on social and mutual support, and community rather than the ‘curative and medical models’ policymakers fixate on. Technology will feature, but other innovation is also important – such as coaching, further study and career changes for older adults.
We need a better story about care and the ageing process. Ageing doesn’t suddenly begin at 65 and is not the same for everyone – with the right support, community and agency, people can remain healthy and independent for longer and continue to participate in society.