AHA - Active and Healthy Aging

Active & Healthy Aging - AHA - is about the strategies, conditions and criteria to enable older people to enjoy a good quality of life - health and wellbeing. Crosstalks starts from a holistic and interdisciplinary approach that addresses both mental and physical health to improve the social determinants of health. Active and healthy aging requires a range of actions and approaches and a structural paradigm shift since older people should maintain the ability to play an active role in society, while that same society should in turn encourage and accommodate this.

Aging and the context in which that happens, often develops in three phases: (1) living at home, (2) living at home with homecare assistance and (3) residence in a care facility. In every three of these phases series of criteria exist to test the quality of health and wellbeing. Every of these phases evokes thresholds and challenges where often bottom-up approaches are not sufficient but where policymakers need to make clear cut choices: financial access of care, efficient and transparent price settings, conversion of acute to chronic care policy, health care trajectories, major differences between home care and care in care facilities, less focus on infrastructure, deal with the overconsumption of medication at home as well as in the senior homes, social innovation, the need for low skilled staff, participation and social wellbeing, stop the ongoing privatization...

Core issues in this project are: How can older people participate actively in society? How can they maintain their independency? How can they put off and avoid the need for care? (and at the same time the costs that go along with it) What are the choices that policy makers and society should boldly make to make this happen? 

Crosstalks focuses on the first two phases and organizes a series of three international seminars to further develop the necessary social debate and will wrap up the new insights into a policy-advisory publication.