Abstract

The ageing of the global population is the most important medical and social demographic problem worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined healthy ageing as a process of maintaining functional ability to enable wellbeing in older age. The WHO, Member States and Partners for Sustainable Development Goals have created a Global Strategy and Action Plan for Ageing and Health for 2016-2020 and its continuation with the WHO programme The Decade of Healthy Ageing 2020-2030. The WHO has established main priorities such as supporting country planning and action, collecting better global data and promoting research on healthy ageing, aligning health systems to the needs of older people, laying the foundations and ensuring the human resources necessary for long-term integrated care, undertaking a global campaign to combat ageism, and enhancing the global network for age-friendly cities and communities. There are several reports of coordinated preventive health and social health initiatives in well developed countries. However, there is little evidence on the application of the active ageing frameworks in developing countries. Greater national capacities and closer monitoring of the progress through age-disaggregated data is needed to effectively implement the intended programmes on healthy ageing.

Keywords

Healthy ageingPopulation ageingActive ageingAction planMedicineAgeingAction (physics)Economic growthGerontologyAgeing societyHealth careGlobal healthPopulationPublic healthEnvironmental healthOlder peopleNursing

MeSH Terms

AgedAgingGlobal HealthHealthy AgingHumansWorld Health Organization

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Publication Info

Year
2020
Type
article
Volume
139
Pages
6-11
Citations
1415
Access
Closed

Social Impact

Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions

Citation Metrics

1415
OpenAlex
45
Influential
1223
CrossRef

Cite This

Ewa Rudnicka, Paulina Napierała, Agnieszka Podfigurna et al. (2020). The World Health Organization (WHO) approach to healthy ageing. Maturitas , 139 , 6-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.maturitas.2020.05.018

Identifiers

DOI
10.1016/j.maturitas.2020.05.018
PMID
32747042
PMCID
PMC7250103

Data Quality

Data completeness: 86%