In early 2021, the New York City Department for the Aging, the Age-friendly NYC Commission, and the Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) hosted a series of webinars to help build trust and acceptance of the Covid-19 vaccines for New York’s older adults, as well as to support more widespread usage of recommended vaccines among adults generally.

The first webinar, Science, Older New Yorkers, and Covid-19 Vaccination: A Virtual Forum Advancing Trust and Confidence for Older New Yorkers, featured a panel of cross-sector experts answering questions from New Yorkers about vaccine safety and the science behind the Covid-19 vaccines. The second webinar, NYC Community Leaders on Building Trust & Confidence for Older New Yorkers to #GetVaccinated Against Covid-19, brought together leaders from across New York City to talk about how and why they decided to get vaccinated.

Click here to watch the first webinar on Vimeo.

Click here to watch the second webinar on Vimeo.

The Alliance to Beat COVID-19 (ABC) aims to encourage COVID-19 immunization for all. The goal of the initiative is to build acceptance with the hesitant, protect the most vulnerable, and facilitate uptake of the vaccine within the 60+ population. As two leaders in science and health strategy, Novim and GCOA are joining forces in our ABC campaign for an effective communication and education strategy that will help global society build the trust in COVID-19 vaccines so that everyone around the globe will be confident and motivated to get vaccinated. 

The global pandemic has launched a heightened level of innovation within the vaccine development community.  Yet too many people are resisting vaccine treatments, across multiple disease groups, due to fear, lack of access, or other factors, leading to a heighten danger of communicable diseases among the general population. COVID-19 vaccine options are now available that have been tested and proven safe and effective. Vaccines must be taken in order to eradicate the disease, secure the safety and health of the most vulnerable populations, and provide relief to the global economy.

Visit the ABC website for more information on the Alliance or to get involved.

GCOA and Pfizer Global Medical Grants launched a $1 million grant program to improve uptake of vaccines among Japanese older adults. The Vaccines for All: Longevity Unleashed for Everyone (VALUE) initiative will support, advance, and validate quality improvement strategies that measurably increase the number of older adults in Japan who are immunized against at least one targeted vaccine-preventable disease. Following a competitive application and review process by an Expert Review Panel, the VALUE Initiative awarded grants to three winning organizations: Keio University, the Health and Global Policy Institute, and the International Longevity Centre-UK. The pilot projects aim to increase vaccine use among Japanese older adults and to better understand vaccine hesitancy in the Japanese context. Results of the pilot projects will be published towards the end of 2021.

The International Vision Health Scorecard aims to increase awareness and policy advancements for better vision health by evaluating government policies and actions on vision health and eye care across 15 countries.

The Scorecard reports on, measures, and compares current country-level performance in vision monitoring, diagnosis, prevention, treatment, care, and support for innovation. It also showcases best practices and highlights areas for improvement.

The 15 countries included in our first edition of the International Vision Health Scorecard are Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

The Scorecard launch webinar convened on November 18, 2020, gathering global and country-level leaders to discuss key opportunities and policy levers to advance action for better vision health and eye care. Click the button below to watch the recording.

To view the launch media release, click here.

The GCOA Playbook on COVID-19, entitled Innovation for 21st-Century Healthy Aging: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, is intended to help us steer a course through the current crisis, prepare us to confront the next one, and promote the policy transformations needed for a successful Decade of Healthy Ageing.

The devastating public health, economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are well documented and continue to mount. Yet history shows that grave crises can also call forth heroic responses. A crisis like COVID-19 can focus our energy; unite us to advance the common good; generate cooperative partnerships among diverse stakeholders; and accelerate the transformative power of innovation to address urgent human needs.

We’ve seen all these creative forces at work in the global response to COVID-19. Although the crisis has not yet passed, it is not too early to start identifying some of the lessons we have learned so we are better prepared to defeat new public health threats, as well as rising challenges that are already on our doorstep.

These lessons should guide public policy reforms, align business practices and provide us a roadmap for decades to come. They have the potential to ensure our society can drive the scientific, medical and health progress needed to help us respond more rapidly and effectively to future virus outbreaks. They also promise to help sustain our highest human aspirations for long, healthy, productive lives by addressing other growing crises, such as the explosion of Alzheimer’s and other diseases that target the rapidly aging global population.

New report published by the Global Coalition on Aging and Nutricia examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on older people’s health and well-being. During the pandemic, the role of nutrition for health has come into sharper focus but still remains under-addressed. The report reinforces the need for integrated care pathways that incorporate nutrition and physical exercise to better support the health of older people now, but also after the pandemic.

GCOA is proud to launch our new report titled, Empowering Women for Healthy Aging: Key Policy Actions to Address Health Challenges Across the Life Course, which calls on policy and health system leaders to advance gender equality and economic growth by empowering women to achieve healthy aging.

Women’s access to quality healthcare and their economic participation are inextricably linked. As women are indispensable leaders in the economy, their communities, and their families, pursuing good health at each stage of the life course must be a target of policymakers and healthcare systems. Doing so can empower women to live long, healthy lives, from youth through old age, and enable their full participation in their economies.

The new report comes during a milestone year. 2020 marks the 25^th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration on Women’s Rights, the 10^th anniversary of UN Women’s foundation, and the commencement of the WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing, central to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The report offers recommendations for policymakers and healthcare systems:

• Support research to better understand women’s lifelong health needs and risks, in childbearing years and as they age, including by increasing participation in research and clinical trials.
• Provide educational resources for women of childbearing age to make healthier choices throughout the life course, supporting prevention and promotion of healthy aging.
• Train healthcare providers and educate caregivers on delivery of integrated, person-centered care for women throughout their lives.
• Implement national screening and prevention programs for conditions particularly affecting and/or under-diagnosed in aging women, which today are often ignored until an acute event.
• Integrate global women’s rights with healthy and active aging – prioritizing women’s health and ability in each of the Decade of Healthy Ageing focus areas.

AMR, the increasing resistance of microbes to existing antibiotics, is a slow and silent threat. It has been a looming global challenge to healthcare over the long history of humanity’s fight against infectious disease. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, AMR had risen as a principal barrier to healthy aging, as it threatens to reverse the 20th-century progress in science, medicine and sanitation that has led to 21st-century longevity. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, attention to the threat of  AMR has grown. If left unaddressed, AMR threatens the health and endurance of the world’s first super-aging society.

The Global Coalition on Aging proposes four actions governments can take to support innovation in AMR and support sustainable healthy and active aging.

Produced by GCOA and Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI), in partnership with Singapore’s Lien Foundation, the 2020 Dementia Innovation Readiness Index shows how cities have largely failed to support innovation in dementia comprehensively, though bright spots exist.

View the recording of the Index launch webinar here.

The Index’s main findings include:

• • Cities must take charge to execute against national dementia plans.
  • Cities must advocate for flexible and transparent funding models enabling regions and cities to adapt national programs and frameworks to local contexts.
  • Cities need to know where they stand with regard to the number of people in the community living with dementia.
  • National-level efforts to improve diagnosis rates for dementia should be aligned with the local community.
  • Post-diagnostic support is a highly localized but under-addressed opportunity for cities.
  • Local governments and service providers must ensure that there is a sufficient supply of affordable and high-quality community-based care providers — including day care, respite care, and in-home care — so that people living with dementia are able to access needed resources.
  • Dementia-friendly principles are the tools and practices that make an organization, community, or society-at-large more accessible and livable for people with dementia, but they also enhance cities and improve quality of life for all citizens.
  • Cities have a role in enabling new and existing funding models for dementia research.

More people die annually from cardiovascular disease than from any other cause. As populations age, urbanization spreads, and the control of infectious and childhood diseases improves, cardiovascular disease prominence rises alongside things like high-fat diets, smoking, and sedentary lifestyles. The global policymaking community and national health systems alike have taken notice of the existing major burden of cardiovascular disease and its projected growth and have embarked on dual-pronged prevention and treatment agendas to avert cardiovascular disease deaths and improve health and wellbeing for all. These increases, moreover, are expected to continue as global society ages even more dramatically – the global population over 60 is predicted to double by mid-century, reaching 2 billion, and for the first time in human history the will be more old than young in societies across the globe.

Existing efforts to combat cardiovascular diseases are realizing success—fewer and fewer people are dying prematurely as a result of heart attacks.3 In some European countries, heart attack deaths have been more than halved over the past 30 years.4 Despite advances in the prevention and management of many chronic conditions, such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer, the medical community has been less successful in reducing mortality or hospitalizations attributed to heart failure. Perversely, falling mortality rates attributed to heart attack actually results in an increased number of long-term survivors of coronary heart disease that are likely to go on to develop heart failure.

View the report here.

In 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, everything about the way we live and work changed.

Workplaces quickly became virtual, cities dispersed, and
a “new normal” began to take hold. For older adults, who are known to be at the greatest risk for infection, the data paints a stark reality. Adults over 80 experience death at five times the global average. In the US, 8 out of 10 deaths have been in adults 65 years of age or older. The impacts of COVID-19 on older adults extend beyond physical health. Nearly one-third of Baby Boomers say confidence in their ability to retire has declined compared to one-quarter of all workers.

As societies around the world gradually reopen and as we consider the long-term impacts of COVID-19, we must identify and leverage our immediate learnings from the crisis and apply those to other related critical areas of need, including our approaches to healthy aging and the silver economy.

Two new reports from the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences find that major health systems are not currently ready for the introduction of new Alzheimer’s treatments. The research shows how several major countries could prepare their health systems to ensure patients can get Alzheimer’s treatments once they hit the market.

The two reports combine desk research with expert insights to provide a comprehensive review of Alzheimer’s disease in five European (EU5) countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) and the U.S. – with a focus on what healthcare systems could do to prepare for the introduction of a novel disease modifying treatment. The research follows the stages of the patient journey to assess the system-wide obstacles to the introduction of a new treatment and how these challenges might be overcome.

The reports were funded by Roche and released in July 2020 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC).

In July 2020, GCOA released a new report on adult vaccinations, in partnership with the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). Adult Vaccinations: Opportunities for Action, Barriers to Engagement, Paths to Healthier Aging shares insights from an expert symposium hosted by the two organizations in late 2019 on the urgency of vaccinations for adults to promote healthy aging. The expert perspectives in the report, which have grown in importance amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, address the individual and societal value of vaccines for older adults, the importance of vaccinations across the life course, and the challenges of vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.

Following the release of the report, AFAR and GCOA will host a joint webinar in late Summer 2020, offering a deeper dive on these insights and their implications in the COVID-19 era. The webinar will convene experts from science and business for an interactive discussion exploring how the ideas shared in the report can offer a road map as we work to ensure a future of health, stability, and renewed economic growth.

In June 2020, Aegon released its annual Retirement Readiness Survey. The 2020 survey explores the vital role of employers in helping workers successfully navigate their working lives and prepare for retirement, a role that has become even more crucial and precarious amid the pandemic. The report examines employer-sponsored retirement and other welfare benefits, flexible work arrangements, and workplace wellness programs. It discusses best practices and provides actionable recommendations for empowering workers. Indeed, while employers are a critical catalyst, they must be supported by public policy, and individuals must engage in the programs offered.
The survey findings identify ways employers can support their employees to extend their working lives and financially prepare for retirement:

• Cultivate an age-friendly workplace that recognizes the value and contributions of workers of all ages.
• Provide retirement, health, and welfare benefits — and design them with portability in mind so that workers can maintain them as their employment situation changes.
• Offer retirement planning services and financial advice.
• Promote financial literacy through training, education, or financial wellness programs.
• Encourage health and well-being by offering a workplace wellness program.
• Offer flexible work arrangements to help workers more easily balance their jobs and their personal lives.
• Facilitate lifelong learning to help workers keep their job skills up to date and relevant.

The report is based on findings from the ninth annual global survey of 15 countries spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia that was conducted in 2020 at the early stages of the pandemic. It is a collaboration among Aegon Center for Longevity and Retirement and nonprofits Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies and Instituto de Longevidade Mongeral Aegon.

A May 2020 report from the Transamerica Center for Retirement Research provides a detailed view of the attitudes and behaviors of Millennial, Generation X, and Baby Boomer workers as they strive to attain long-term financial security, both before and during the current coronavirus pandemic. The report is based on data from a survey of more than 5,000 workers in the U.S. conducted in late 2019, and supplemented by a survey of 2,000 in April 2020.

As of April 2020, almost one in four U.S. workers say their confidence in their ability to retire comfortably has declined in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The report found 58 percent of workers have experienced one or more impacts to their employment situation as a result of the pandemic, including reduced work hours (29 percent), reduced salaries (17 percent), layoffs (16 percent), furloughs (11 percent), and early retirement (5 percent).

Importantly, the report also highlights opportunities that can help mitigate the negative economic effects of the pandemic and improve retirement prospects.

In November 2019, a multi-stakeholder group of experts, including GCOA and several leading patient, caregiver, and professional groups, launched the Heart Failure Charter. The Heart Failure Charter served as a call to action to reduce preventable heart failure hospitalizations and improve patient outcomes, targeting key unmet needs across the continuum of care where intervention and educational efforts can improve overall patient outcomes. The American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, the National Alliance for Caregiving, and the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association are among the organizations leading this work.

In May 2020, the group launched a Patient Empowerment Tool for heart failure patients, along with a special addendum to help patients and their families navigate the global Covid-19 pandemic. The tool highlights key rights patients should know and offers high-level guidance to support self-care management and empowerment upon hospital discharge, while the Covid-19 addendum addresses particular concerns for heart failure patients during the global pandemic. Empowering heart failure patients can reduce their symptoms and contribute to better quality of life and fewer delays in the hospital because of a worsening condition.

The Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) Playbook Series captures best practices and key insights from the global business leaders who are embracing one of the most transformative mega-trends of our time: population aging. With the GCOA Playbook, we aim to help forward-thinking businesses and executives seize aging as a driver of engagement, productivity and competitive advantage. We built the GCOA Playbook upon proven aging strategies that stretch across all facets of a global business — from C-Suite and HR to marketing, from customer acquisition to employee retention, and from successful thought leadership to improving the bottom-line. Our featured companies are not only “walking the walk.” They are seeing real results.