Assessing environments to support healthy aging and reduce social isolation
Emily Rugel, PhD
The population of adults aged 60-plus is growing rapidly around the world, expected to more than double to more than two billion by 2050, and the World Health Organization has declared 2020-2030 the “Decade of Healthy Ageing” in response to this demographic shift. Although much of the conversation around healthy aging has focused on individual risk factors and health behaviors, the built, natural, and social environments all play significant roles. This webinar will describe indicators of age-friendly environments at the community level, particularly in low- and middle-income countries and in rural settings, as well presenting findings from an indicator-development effort within the global Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiology study (PURE). In light of the increased vulnerability to COVID-19 at this stage of life and the additional restrictions on social interactions that have resulted, we’ll also discuss what is known about roles for community design in reducing social isolation and how these findings can be integrated into age-friendly policies and designs that maximize overall population-health benefits without exacerbating well-known health inequities.
Emily Rugel
Postdoctoral fellow, Simon Fraser University
Emily Rugel is a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University and an honorary postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, where her work explores health-promoting community design across the lifespan with the aim of developing evidence that can be embedded in sustainability plans and integrated in policies that advance equity. She received her doctorate from the University of British Columbia, where she developed a regional model of access to natural spaces and applied it to prescription and health-survey data to clarify pathways linking urban nature to social ties and mental health. In addition to a Ph.D., she holds a Master of Public Health and a B.A. in Journalism, but firmly believes in the acquisition of knowledge through chance encounters as well as scientific investigation.
The views and opinions expressed by invited webinar presenters do not necessarily reflect those of the NCCEH and our funder, the Public Health Agency of Canada.