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E-book Healthy Ageing : A Capability Approach to Inclusive Policy and Practice

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Penilaian

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Healthy ageing is the ideal trajectory from birth to death. As we reach older age, physical changes are inevitable, but it is not simply the effect of these changes that makes ageing healthy or unhealthy. An older person may have many years of inca-pacity as they decline slowly towards death. Or they may be well and functioning happily until a very rapid shift into loss of life (the ideal of dying suddenly in one’s sleep while in the midst of life). It is the latter trajectory that many people desire and the aim of promoters of healthy ageing. However, the question raised by this recognition of the ideal trajectory is, what is health? Concerns regarding population ageing have brought ageing and health under additional scrutiny. These concerns have coincided with new perspectives on healthy ageing, captured in descriptive phrases such as ‘successful ageing’, ‘active ageing’, ‘positive ageing’, or ‘ageing well’. In this chapter we discuss the context of healthy ageing in the 21st century, including an ageing population and current policy dis-courses of ‘successful ageing’. Critiques of these inf luences lead us to examine the effects of dominant discourses that view ageing as a problem to be solved and conf late ageing with poor health. Together, these discourses construct ageing as a social prob-lem which will increase the need for health care and make unreasonable demands on the public purse. This chapter describes alternative ways of understanding health for older people and introduces the Capability Approach as a socially based and ethically oriented way to understand older people’s health. The world’s populations are ageing. Population ageing means that there is both a rise in the average age of the population as well as a growing proportion of older people within populations. According to the WHO (World Health Organization, 2012), between 2000 and 2050 the proportion of the world’s population aged over 60 years will double from about 11% to 22%. Nearly a quarter of the population will be older than 60 and by 2025, for the first time, there will be more older people than children. We might have expected that the growing numbers of older people would make a difference to their acceptance. However, recognition that the population is ageing has engendered additional fear and distaste. These shifts in the shape of the population are usually described in terms of the proportion of older versus younger people, and increased ‘dependency ratios’. Dependency ratios are calcu-lated in terms of the proportion of older and younger people in the population. As such, understandings of these changes are shaped in terms of generational shifts and intergenerational burden. Such generational changes have focused attention on the likely increased costs of health care and pensions for increasing numbers of older people (Binstock, 2010). Older people are more often portrayed as some sort of universal ‘other’ in the media or in policy statements where images such as a ‘silver tsunami’ or ‘tidal wave’ of ageing people about to descend upon ‘us’ are used (e.g., Martin, Williams, & O’Neill, 2009). Ann Robertson (1997) has criti-cally named this the “apocalyptic demography” scenario in which the growing older population, with its ailing, retired bodies and high health care costs, drains the larger society and brings economic and social catastrophe.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

610.28 STE h

Penerbit

New York : Taylor & Francis., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

180 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781315639093

Klasifikasi

610.28

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Auxiliary Techniques

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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