The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) is a committed partner of the Age-Friendly Public Health Systems (AFPHS) movement. During the beginning of 2022, ASTHO conducted a widespread environmental scan to track and identify public health trends within the United States.
Without appropriate and accessible transportation options, older adults may miss crucial medical appointments, miss opportunities for social engagement, and be limited in their ability to visit with family and shop for nutritious foods.
More older Americans live in rural communities than urban – 4 percent more. And these older adults also have higher levels of health and social needs.
Public health is broadly and uniquely focused on population health and all that it entails. Because a population’s health and well-being are greatly influenced by having safe, healthy, “livable” places to reside, work and stay active and engaged, a major focus of public health is to support and create livable communities.
So far this year, Trust for America’s Health’s Age-Friendly Public Health Systems training series has focused on the public health roles in addressing social determinants of health, and we’ve proposed some new areas to think about as social determinants, such as technology.
Millions of older adults are harmed by food insecurity. On average, from 2018-2020, 8.2 percent of the more than 47.6 million households with adults age 60 and older lacked reliable access to food.
We are all aging, but social determinants of health direct to a large extent the story of how we age, our life expectancy, and quality of life.
With high-quality care and successes of HIV treatment over the past three decades, people diagnosed with HIV now have a nearly normal life expectancy.
In the opening pages of his 2015 book, The Health Gap, Dr. Michael Marmont asks, “Why [do we] treat people and send them back to the conditions that made them sick?”.
The lessons of the past year are numerous, but none has been so profound as the value of healthy aging.