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Closing the evidence gap on older refugees
Amidst the continuing and growing Coronavirus crisis this year’s World Refugee Day has again passed almost unnoticed, despite the nearly 80 million people who are forcibly displaced around th...
Government Response to COVID-19 and the Elderly
Since my last blog from April 9, 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has continued with more infections in all corners of the world. There are now roughly 15 million cases, which is about 10 times the numb...
GROWING OLDER, CREATIVELY, TOGETHER
It was of course the Oxford Institute on Ageing who got the ball rolling. Fifteen years ago the staff team at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London were stirred by reports of widespread poor treatm...
Canadians Aging in Place
As Canada celebrates its 153rd birthday this July 1, the population of aging Canadians continues to expand with more than 6.5 million people aged 65 and older and approximately 7% of these individu...
Why Do Japanese Wear Masks?
Extraordinary measures have been taken in most parts of the world to contain the covid-19 pandemic. Most of us have had to adapt our daily lives to help slow the spread of the virus, protect the mo...
Digital living and the doughnut economy
Over the last few months, most of the world has implemented social distancing measures that have the effect of accelerating the digitalisation of our daily activities. Because our ability to move f...
Will a rethink on offices benefit older workers?
As the great pandemic of 2020 infiltrates every corner of our lives, there is one place perhaps more than any other that has been affected. This is the office, the defining building type of the 20t...
The Next Normal After the Pandemic: Boost in Workplace Automation
The coronavirus pandemic is set to generate the ‘next normal’ in the workplace by accelerating automation. It’s not just that during times of recession companies strive to cut cos...
The political convenience of the “best science available” and a “mountain of data”
In early March, in the early stages of the UK’s response to the COVID-19 crisis this Blog discussed whether experts now know what they are talking about, based on the observation that governm...
Reaching older people in a crisis: learning from experience?
In a recent policy brief on Coronavirus and ageing, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs declared that the virus mean that the world was grappling with “an unparalleled he...
Using a nanny cam to safeguard my mother's health
A couple of years ago, I attended a talk at The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing on "Speculative Design." A colleague who worked in the area of digital health walked us thr...
Leveraging design expertise for an ageing society
Two uncontested facts about the UK: first, we have an ageing population that can be especially vulnerable in a public health crisis; second, we have one of the world’s largest and most advanc...
COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa, MENA Region
It has been several weeks since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. Different countries have reported different infection and mortality rates. Spain, Italy and t...
Notes on religion and spirituality in later life
For some time, I have wondered about the relationship between spirituality/religion and well-being in old age. What kind of evidence is there that they promote good physical and mental health and g...
COVID-19 Impacts on Young and Old
We are living through one of the worst health crises in recent history. Let’s begin with what we know about this virus. COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that can cause serious respiratory dise...