WHO Approach to Healthy Aging

Health systems need a comprehensive and drastic revision of their approaches to promote better care for the aging populations to tackle and solve the stigmas applied to older persons. Healthy aging defines the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that allows well-being in older age. It is based on three cardinal factors for the person: functional ability (i.e., “health-related attributes that enable people to be and to do what they have reason to value”), intrinsic capacity (i.e., the composite of all the physical and mental capacities of an individual), and environment. The maintenance of functional ability represents the common goal of the public health framework. At the same time, the intrinsic capacity model entails an essential shift from a negative to a positive perception of health, quitting obsolete traditional paradigms (i.e., diseases, impairments, disabilities) to the assessment of the individual’s positive attributes (i.e., functions, reserves). In this chapter, a novel approach that the World Health Organization has recently described for promoting healthy aging in our societies is presented. The framework promotes a substantial modification of the health and social care systems that should be redesigned having the individual at the center of a multidisciplinary and multidimensional action.