Author: Professor Fiona Blyth AM, CEPAR Chief Investigator and Professor of Public Health and Pain Medicine, University of Sydney
One of the key challenges facing societies across the world is how to respond to population ageing positively and purposefully. In step with the demographic shift towards population ageing, our thinking about what healthy ageing means has evolved beyond a focus on the presence or absence of disease. Contemporary concepts of healthy ageing focus on functional ability - those capabilities that enable people to move around, build and maintain relationships, meet their basic needs, make decisions, and contribute to society. The question of how we create policy, physical and social equity environments that enable healthy ageing is core business for CEPAR.
Last week marked an important step to building the evidence base and research infrastructure for healthy ageing research with the launch on 26 October of the Healthy Ageing Toolkit Project which has been led by Dr Saman Soltani-Khalatbari, CEPAR Fellow at the Centre’s University of Sydney node, with support from the Toolkit team and funded by CEPAR.
The Healthy Ageing Toolkit is a searchable database containing key information on 287 cohort studies from around the world that are suitable for studying healthy ageing and its social and environmental factors. This information has never before been available in an aggregated and accessible form and has the potential to transform research and policy in the area of healthy ageing.
The Toolkit is available here.