Three Score Years and Twenty and counting - BBC Analysis radio programme

The BBC recently had an excellent radio programme about ageing called Three Score Years and Twenty.

To be honest there was nothing said that any reader of my blog will not have heard zillions of times but it is always nice to hear others confirm the importance of these issues.

There were are couple of things said that I thought it worth capturing the soundbite - both made from Professor Sarah Harper of the Oxford Institute of Ageing.

Firstly something Kim Walker and I have been saying for ages and spent a lot of time describing in our book  - Marketing to the Ageing Consumer. I quote what she said.

We probably need to change our physical environment. All the research work that has been done about changing the home and work environment shows that it becomes easier for everybody. If you look at a street the kind of problems that a mother with push chair has is just the kind that a 70 or 80 year old in the future would have. We will have to learn how to combine older workers who may be a carer for frail disabled parents or grandparents or if they are in their 70s dealing with the onset of their own disabilities so that we can accommodate all of the demands of these long life courses within our societies.

To hear the point being made by the lady herself listen to the soundbite.

Another issue that I often talk about is the particular issues facing those people in their 50s. Saga always identifies this problem when it surveys the older people in the UK. You can listen to what Sarah Harper has to say about this.

All in all, a very good programme and well worth 30 mins of your life. You can hear it via the BBC web site (depending where you live).

I will leave the final words to Sarah Harper (she could have taken directly out of the our book)

We fundamentally have got to change our whole concept of what our society is like and what our individual lives are like we have to say ‘what about our housing’ ‘what about our transport’ ‘what about our working lives’ ‘what about our workplaces’ everything that we have taken for granted is going to have to change over the next 40 to 50 years as our population shifts.

Dick Stroud