The country’s biggest health crisis is a ticking time bomb – The Age

Right across the community in government, media and coffee shops, we speak about our ageing population as being an economic time bomb. We speak about age as something to be endured rather than celebrated and harnessed. We speak about age as something to steel ourselves against, and certainly something to be delayed if possible.

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Tackling this deep-seated discrimination, that we subject on ourselves, the people we love and those around us, is one of the great challenges of this century. The impacts are real on people, on the workforce, on the broader economy.

Luckily, Australia has a proud history of vanguard public health campaigns that have saved lives, health budgets and averted disaster. Whether its our efforts to curb smoking, educate at-risk groups about HIV, or screen for breast cancer, major interventions in the national consciousness are sometimes necessary to set us up for the decades to come.

Ageism and the effect on our health system, workforce and economy has reached the point that it requires urgent action in the form of a large-scale government-funded public education campaign to reduce it. A campaign of this sort can treat the cause of many emerging ills that we are experiencing. The Band-Aids weve been using to cover up the symptoms are rapidly failing.

In aged care, the impacts are particularly apparent. Failures are being strung up for all to see through the royal commission. But the interim report has made it clear that the root cause of issues facing aged care delivery in this country come from a negative attitude on how to deal with age.

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There are significant funding disparities and access issues for older people between mainstream hospitals, residential aged care and the disability system. These are justified by an underlying attitude that says older people are less deserving of high-needs health care.

But as we live longer and better than ever before, our ageing population is actually a huge opportunity. We can contribute for longer in work, in family and education. To harness these opportunities we need to end discrimination, level the playing field in health care and make sure that everyone plays a role in planning for their own ageing.

Until we start to see age as an opportunity it will continue to disrupt and cause problems. We Australians can kick the can down the road and face the consequences or we can reimagine our economy to include older people and help them live better and longer in the process.

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The country's biggest health crisis is a ticking time bomb - The Age