Lots of useful information in the Lancet and it's free

The highly respected Lancet journal has published a series of reports about Health in Europe. You will need to register for the journal but the papers are free and well worth downloading.

You can read an overview of the main findings in Bloomberg.

Needless to say, a lot of the material is about ageing. There is a paper about the relative position of the UK's NHS compared with other countries. I think the less said about that the better!

I thought this quote was interesting.

Health systems can become more age friendly in several ways, including through improved public health measures, enabling of better self-care, investigation of different ways to organise and provide health services, better integration of services across levels of care, improved management of hospital admissions and discharges, and adaptation to an ageing health workforce.

I can think of a lot more ways that the age-friendliness can be improved on top of those listed above.

Perhaps it is just as well that we are working on adapting the Age Friendly Audit tool to provide a detailed way of evaluating the Patient Journey to ensure that it is age-friendly. From what we have seen, few of the touchpoints are designed to reflect the age of the people using them. Well at least that is one thing that health care providers have in common with consumer goods companies. Dick Stroud