Author: Dr Brad Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Physiology, School of Life Sciences, University of Westminster
According to the United Nations, the worldâs population crossed the 8 billion people line on the 15th November, 2022; a lot has been written about this event, and will continue to be, with regards to sustainable populations, constant growth, and economic implications.
But while people have become used to the worldâs population continuously growing, what happens when it doesnât? In some countries the populations growth (simply put, births minus deaths) are shrinking. In the United Kingdom, this is currently being offset by inwards migration, but in countries such as Japan, weâre seeing ânegative growthâ, or the countryâs population decreasing overall. This has resulted in a rapidly ageing population; the average age of society is shifting upwards. Over the next decades, this trend is expected to occur globally, and weâll become an âageing worldâ.
My research focuses on the biology of ageing, trying to explain the how and why musculoskeletal function changes with age. Many people assume that the frailty of ageing is inescapable, as you grow older, your bones will get weaker and your muscles will decay away. Much of the work weâre currently doing is showing that to only be partly true, and that itâs quite possible to maintain âyoung-likeâ muscle function into your 60âs and 70âs.
The UK is Growing Older
In the UK, 1 in 5 people are currently over the age of 65, and by 2050 this is predicted to be 1 in 4. This has significant implications for the nationâs healthcare, taxable income if youâre a government providing services such as the NHS, and how your society operates overall. As we recently identified in Understanding âEarly Exitersâ; The Case for a Healthy Ageing Workforce Strategy, the UKâs ageing population is unique. Unlike peer states in Western Europe, since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic the UK has experienced a significant rise in 50â64-year-olds who have involuntarily left the workforce. Currently in the UK 1 in 7 people between the ages of 50-64 are not in the workforce.
âNo other high-income country has seen a comparable sustained rise in over 50s remaining economically inactive since the start of the pandemic. The phenomenon of âEarly Exitersâ is a very British one.â
– From Understanding Early Exiters
The reasons why the UK specifically had significant numbers of middle-aged-to-older people exiting the workforce is undeniably complicated. A major conclusion of the research conducted for this report was that chronic long term health conditions resulted in people being unable to work, but unexpectedly that Long Covid specifically was rarely one of them. âThe Pandemicâ caused people to exit the workplace, but not Covid per se. However, itâs important to note that age and disease do not have to go hand in hand. Indeed, poor health and chronic health conditions are better predictors of absence from the workforce, not age.
ONS data suggests that the two major reasons why over 50âs leave the workforce are either long-term sickness or voluntary retirement (graph above). Our focus group data revealed that many people would state âretiredâ as their main reason for leaving work, however their underlying choice to retire was long-term health reasons, either their own or of a close family member who required care. It appears that âretiredâ as a category for leaving work was also capturing a significant number of long-term sickness cases. In June of 2022, 2.2 million people aged 50-64 were outside the workforce either due to being retired or having a long-term health condition.
âMost âEarly Exitersâ we spoke to felt like they had no choice but to leave work early, despite the financial risks of doing soâ
– From Understanding Early Exiters
What Solutions Are There?
Having identified many people in the UK were involuntarily outside the workforce, and that this number was only expected to grow in the short-to-medium term, we wanted to provide a range of policy based cross-party recommendations that could address this issue. These recommendations spanned short, medium, and long term changes and can be briefly synthesized as:
- Support older people with health conditions to continue working
- Help older people with health conditions to return to work
- Medium-term prevention by improving the quality and design of work and the workplace so that they support older workersâ health
- Long-term prevention by improving public health over the course of peopleâs lives, and by advancing scientific research, including physiological research, on ageing.
The âLevelling Upâ strategy by the current government included a statement that the UK should aspire to increase healthy life expectancy by 5 years, but this is currently not being met. As our society continues to age, both the effect of long-term health conditions must be addressed in the short-term, and in the longer-term adequate research needs to be undertaken to understand how and why we age, and what can be prevented with age to help maintain a healthy older population who can both work and live as independently as possible. As the wider worlds society âcatches upâ and experiences ageing populations, what lessons the UK learns over the next few decades on supporting an ageing population will need to be transferred globally.
More information about the Ageing Workforce report launch and highlights by The Physiological Society can be found here.
Featured image credit: Center for Ageing Better Image Library
Author: Dr Bradley Elliott is a Senior Lecturer in Physiology at the University of Westminster, where his research examples the physiology of human ageing. He also has a science communication role, writing for several publications and regularly appearing on documentaries on ageing, as well as participating in policy discussions on human ageing. Besides his academic role, he is also a Trustee of the British Society of Research on Ageing.
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