People are living longer than ever, but adding healthy years matters as much as adding years. This World Health Organization explainer looks at healthy ageing — how to stay active, independent and well later in life.
Video credit: World Health Organization.
The WHO’s definition, which the explainer unpacks, is functional rather than medical: healthy ageing means maintaining the abilities that let a person be and do what they value — moving, deciding, contributing, remaining connected — as the years accumulate. It is the premise of the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing, the global programme running from 2021 to 2030 under which the WHO has been pressing governments to measure healthspan, the years lived in good health, with the same seriousness as lifespan.
The gap between the two numbers is where the policy battle sits. In much of the world it now runs to a decade or more — years of life lived with preventable limitation. Health systems built to treat episodes, the WHO argues, must learn to preserve capability instead, a redesign the explainer walks through in ordinary language.
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