The Basics of Healthy Aging

What Is Healthy Aging?

The Healthy Aging Network and the NCHAN have adopted a clear, holistic definition of healthy aging:

Healthy aging is the development and maintenance of optimal physical, mental and social well-being and function in older adults. It is most likely to be achieved when physical environments and communities are safe, and support the adoption and maintenance by individuals of attitudes and behaviors known to promote health and well-being; and by the effective use of health services and community programs to prevent or minimize the impact of acute and chronic disease on function.

Who is Responsible for the Health of Older Adults?

Building on the definition of healthy aging, the HAN national group also selected a conceptual framework that is based on the Socio-Ecological model. The Socio-Ecological model places the responsibility for promoting healthy aging into multiple levels, including older adults, their families and friends, their health care providers, community agencies and the community at large, laws and policies, and physical environments. In other words, promoting health for older adults is a group responsibility.

At What Age Should Health Promotion Begin?

Basically, when it comes to programming to enhance health and quality of life, it’s never too late to start and it’s also never too early to start. The International Longevity Center urges policy makers and program planners to think about three different behavioral aims when planning health promotion initiatives: initiation of healthy behaviors, maintenance of healthy behaviors, and enhancement of healthy behaviors. These aims should be carried out over the lifespan so that children, younger and middle-aged adults can grow into a healthy old age.

Many insurance companies and service providers are now targeting the baby boomer middle age sector of the population to help them maintain their health and avoid or manage chronic diseases in order to prevent, delay or diminish disability in later life.

What’s The Best Way to Build Healthy Aging Programs?

Community service providers may find it difficult to prove that their health promotion programs making tangible, positive differences in the lives of their older adult clients. They may be asking themselves:

• Does my health promotion program truly benefit the older adult population I want to target?
• Can I be sure that my program doesn’t cause harm or waste limited resources?
• If I’m using untested or unproven approaches or evaluation measures, how can my funders or I determine whether my program is truly effective or unsuccessful?
• If my program isn’t successful, how do I know if it was the wrong type of intervention, or the population served didn’t need or couldn’t benefit from the program, or whether I used the wrong measures to evaluate the program?

To answer these questions, aging service providers need to know which health promotion programs have been shown to work, then how to implement what works within their community context, and finally how to evaluate the program -- to provide quality services to their clientele, use program resources wisely, and sustain the program if proven effective in the setting. Evidence-based health promotion is a process that helps.

Using the Evidence-based Health Promotion Process

Evidence-based health promotion is a process of planning, implementing, and evaluating programs adapted from tested models or interventions in order to address health issues in an ecological context. Evidence-based health promotion includes the tasks and steps listed in the attached table.

Ideally, the program developed through these steps will include multiple interventions at different ecological levels. For example, when promoting physical activity, providers might run a community awareness campaign about the benefits of physical activity for healthy aging, increase the number of physical activity programs offered at their agency, and advocate with community planners to build more walking trails and neighborhood sidewalks.

For more information about evidence-based health promotion, suggested reading includes the NCOA Issue Brief, Using the Evidence Base to Promote Healthy Aging.

Some Key Questions about Health Promotion and Aging that Providers and Researchers Can Answer Together

There is much to be learned about what works for promoting healthy aging. This website provides links to proven health promotion programs and research initiatives that are tackling this important topic. It is important that providers and researchers work together as partners to prevent disease and promote health through the development and testing of programs that focus on the health of the older population in the community, and particularly, focus on populations that experience health disparities. For studying health promotion and aging, researchers and their partners might ask the following questions:

• What are the health benefits of modifying a particular risk (such as under-nutrition or obesity) or behavioral factor (such as a sedentary life style)?
• What is the incidence (new cases in a year) and prevalence (overall cases) of the risk or behavioral factor in our communities, geographic regions, and among what subgroups?
• What are the factors (such as individual-level knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, or environmental-level physical structures like walking paths) that make it possible to modify the risk or behavioral factor?
• Can we develop successful community interventions to facilitate change in the risk or behavioral factor?
• What policies, programs and environmental-ecological strategies lead to positive change in the risk or behavioral factor?