Source: Age-Friendly Public Health – Trust for America’s Health
TFAH is partnering with the Florida Department of Health to implement a public health framework to improve the health and well-being of older adults.
There is growing momentum for public health to contribute to programs, policies, and innovative interventions to promote health and well-being for people as they age. Although public health efforts are partly responsible for the dramatic increases in longevity over the twentieth century, historically there have been limited collaborations across the public health and aging fields.
With funding from The John A. Hartford Foundation, Trust for America’s Health is partnering with the Florida Department of Health to implement a public health framework to improve the health and well-being of older adults, focusing on areas where public health can support, complement, or enhance aging services. Our work strives to engage the public health system in efforts to address the health and well-being of older adults, both individually and, importantly, by creating the conditions at the community level that older adults need to achieve and maintain their optimal health and well-being.
The initiative will promote the innovative aging work in Florida already under way, including the implementation of Age-Friendly Communities, which help to build rapport between the public health and aging sectors and contribute to a national movement to advance an age-friendly public health system. Among the possible outcomes will be an increase in public health engagement in the “age-friendly communities” movement, the release of community-wide health data reports about older adults that will be useful for policymakers and the public, and the targeting of existing community-level public health programs (such as home visiting, immunizations and screening) to older adults. In the process, we will learn more about the necessary steps for success so they can be shared with the public health systems in other states.