Growing old is a lifelong process – International Day of Older Persons 1 October 2021

We are waking up to the fact that no domain – from healthcare, to entertainment, to business, technology, or the built environment – will be unaltered by the permanent, global and unprecedented phenomenon of population ageing, read more here. Research in the UK shows a clear appetite among the public for a new way of talking about ageing – seeing growing older as a lifelong process, and recognising the opportunities as well as the challenges of ageing and later life, read more in the UK Centre for Aging Better Report Reframing aging (2021). The United Nations Decade of Healthy Aging (2021-2030) is a global collaboration, aligned with the last ten years of the Sustainable Development Goals, that brings together governments, civil society, international agencies, professionals, academia, the media, and the private sector to improve the lives of older people, their families, and the communities in which they live.  The UN declared 1 October as the International Day of Older Persons with the 2021 theme “Digital Equity for All Ages”.

The Australian population is undergoing a major shift; in 2017 over  1 in 7 people were aged 65 and over, which is projected to increase to 21–23% of the population by 2066 (ABS 2018) – older Australians are a growing proportion of the total population. There are many negative attitudes and beliefs about what it means to be an older person and a coalition of diverse Australian organisations and individuals have committed to positively influence the way Australia thinks about ageing and older people. EveryAGE Counts is an advocacy campaign aimed at tackling ageism, deeply engrained attitudes and assumptions about ageing and older people. Ageism is pervasive but often hidden, it has been called a prejudice or discrimination against a category of people—in this case, against older people, read more here

Consumers Federation of Australia (CFA)  is engaging with these challenges by supporting a representative to participate on the Standards Australia Technical Committee on Aging societies (MB-027) which contributes to the work of the international standards development committee ISO TC 314 Aging societies Find out more about the CFA Standards Project and how you can get involved.


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