Socially inclusive ageing: a lifecourse study of new ageing populations

社会健康，不孤独或孤立，拥有牢固的关系并感受到当地社区的一部分，有助于促进老年人的健康和福祉。统计数据显示，社会健康状况良好的人比社会健康状况差的人寿命更长。他们的身心健康也更好，不太可能过度饮酒、吸烟或久坐不动。促进和支持良好的社会关系是为政府的一项关键政策-健康老龄化重大挑战-做出贡献的一种方式，该政策的目标是到2035年将健康的活跃生活增加5年，并缩小英国最富有和最不享有特权的群体之间长达20年的差距。由于社会健康的重要性，已经制定了一系列服务和政策来帮助我们保持社会健康，但很少有人实现这一目标。我们认为，我们未能提供能够改善社会健康的服务的部分原因可能是因为我们对什么能促进良好的社会健康的理解受到研究类型的限制。大多数研究只在一个时间点衡量社会健康状况。我们的研究将着眼于40岁及以上的人在更长的时间内提供的社会健康信息。这可能是几十年，甚至是他们成年后的整个生活。通过这种方式，我们可以绘制出进入和离开糟糕的社会健康状况的路径；那些迁入/进入和离开糟糕的社会健康状况的群体的特征，以及与这些变化相关的事件，如离婚或其他东西，如财富或有大量开放空间的社区。我们对老年人社会健康的理解是有限的，因为我们的研究往往排除了某些老年人群体。我们的项目包括三组我们知之甚少的老年人。我们的第一组人是1950-1975年间从加勒比海/印度次大陆移民到英国的那些在异国他乡变老的人。这些人经常来工作，从来没有打算在这里变老。我们的第二组是那些从出生起就有身体和精神残疾的老年人。由于存活率的提高，出生时患有脑瘫或唐氏综合症的人现在平均可以活到60多岁。我们的第三组是拥有LGBTQ+身份的老年人。所有这些群体在他们的一生中都经历了严重的歧视，我们将找出这是否影响了他们的社会健康。我们将比较来自我们三个群体的40岁及以上人群的社会健康状况及其随时间的变化，并将其与来自更广泛社区的相同年龄和性别的人的经历进行比较。我们将研究丧亲或离婚等人生经历如何与社会健康联系在一起。我们使用出生队列，跟踪了1946年、1958年和1970年在一周内出生的所有儿童。我们将使用专注于50岁以上人群的调查，如英国老龄化纵向研究，它对人们进行了20年的跟踪调查，以及理解社会研究，它自1991年以来一直对人们进行跟踪调查。我们亦会访问三个组别的人士，了解他们在年老和社会健康方面的经历。我们的计划所收集的资料，可能有助我们设计更适时、更切合长者个人需要的服务、政策和干预措施，从而促进更健康和更积极的晚年生活。我们将与老年人、那些制定政策的人和服务提供商合作，将我们学到的东西汇集在一起，并与尽可能多的人分享。我们将与老年人和服务提供商合作，开发指南和工具包等资源，以及共享信息的网络。这将让更多的人使用我们的研究成果，并帮助设计更好的服务。

Being socially healthy, not being lonely or isolated, having strong relationships and feeling part of the local community, promotes the health and wellbeing of older people. Statistics show that people with good social health live longer than those with poor social health. They also have better physical and mental health and are less likely to drink alcohol to excess, smoke or be sedentary and not physically active. Promoting and supporting good social relationships is one way to contribute to a key government policy, the health ageing grand challenge which aims to increase healthy active life by 5 years by 2035 and reduce the up to 20-year difference in this between the most and least privileged groups in Britain. Because of the importance of social health, a range of services, and policies to help us be socially healthy have been developed but few have achieved this goal. We think part of our failure to provide services that can improve social health may be because our understanding of what promotes good social health is limited by the type of studies do. Most studies measure social health at only at one time point. Our study will look at information about social health provided by people aged 40 and over for a much longer period.This could be several decades or even across the whole of their adult life. This way we can map the pathways into and out of poor social health; the characteristics of those groups who move /into and out of poor social health and the events that are linked to these changes such as divorce or other things such as wealth or a neighbourhood that has lots of open spaces.Our understanding of the social health of older people is limited because our research often excludes certain groups of older people. Our project includes three group of older adults about whom we know little about. Our first group are those people who are 'growing old in a foreign land' who migrated from the Caribbean/Indian sub-continent to the UK between 1950-1975. These people often came for work and never intended to grow old here. Our second group are those ageing with disabilities physical mental that they have had from birth. Because of increases in survival rates people born with cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome can now expect to live, on average, to their 60s. Our third group are older adults with LGBTQ+ identity. All these groups have experienced significant discrimination across their lifecourse we will find out if it has affected their social health. We will compare social health and how it changes over time for people aged 40 and older from our 3 groups and compare this with the experiences of people of the same age and gender drawn from the wider community. We will look at how experiences across the lifecourse such as bereavement or divorce, are linked with social health. We use birth cohorts that have followed up all the children born in one week in 1946, 1958 and 1970. We will use surveys which focus on those aged 50+ such the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing which has followed people up for 20 years and the Understanding Society study which has been following people up since 1991. We will also conduct interviews with people from each of our three groups to get their stories about experiences of ageing and their social health.The information from our project will collect may help us to design services, policies and interventions that are timelier and more tailored to the needs of individual older people and so help to promote a healthier and more active old age. We will work together with older people, those who develop policies and service providers to pull together the things we have learned and share it with as many people as possible. We will work with older people and service providers to develop resources such as guidelines and toolkits, and networks for sharing information. This will allow more people to use the results of our research and help design better services.