What do cocaine addiction, road crossings and climate change all have in common?

England's population is ageing. Almost one in five people (19%) are aged 65 and over with that proportion expected to increase to 26% by 2065.

Population ageing is recognised as an important issue for UK policy-makers because it has undeniable implications for healthcare, social care, pensions, housing and public finances.  It’s often portrayed as a looming calamity – a recent report from the charity, the Institute for Public Policy Research, claims that population ageing will account for almost 80% of the additional fiscal pressure facing the UK by 2075.

But with adequate preparation and the adoption of age-friendly policies including age-friendly employment and age-friendly communities, society can flourish even as the demographic profile changes.

But in order to take the steps needed for our ageing population, we need to understand who and where our older people are; what their lives are like; and what their needs and preferences are. And for this we need data – because data shapes government policy, informs business decisions and influences the products and services we use every day. When we open a banking app, cross a busy road, use self-service technology or receive healthcare, we are interacting with systems that have been designed because of the data we have on people, their needs and their preferences.

The problem is that the data often is not good enough and sometimes decisions are  made without a full or accurate picture of what the older people in our society want or need. We explore this in our new report, A Cycle of Invisibility: How Older People Are Overlooked in Data and Research.

Many will be familiar with Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, which highlighted how a lack of data about women led to products, services and systems that work better for men. As an example, vehicle safety testing that historically relied on crash-test dummies modelled on the average male body has contributed to higher risks of serious injury for women.

Well, something very similar is happening with older people. Take pedestrian crossings that are often timed using walking speeds that many older people cannot comfortably achieve; or airport biometric systems that struggle to recognise older users because age-related changes in skin elasticity weren’t considered in design and testing.

Since our report was drafted, a new study has reported that projections on the consequences of intolerable heat in our warming planet have been relying on data from young adults (18 to 34 years) and applying it to all age groups, with no regard for the fact that people become increasingly vulnerable to heat at older ages. As a consequence, projections have significantly under-estimated the global consequences of climate change.

A recent news story has reported that 1,000 older people are going to A&E every day in the UK because of the harmful side-effects they’re experiencing as a result of interactions between the multiple drugs they’re taking simultaneously. The side effects of each individual drug are known but the ways in which various combinations of these interact in older patients have been entirely overlooked.

And in another report, also published since we drafted A Cycle of Invisibility, the International Longevity Centre has highlighted that while cocaine use is increasing among older people, treatment services are designed for a younger cohort. As a consequence, older people in need of support and treatment are being entirely missed.

These examples might seem unrelated, but they share a common cause: systems being designed and maintained without a sufficiently accurate understanding of older people – indeed older people aren’t being considered at all. In fact, they are quite invisible in all of these examples. Sometimes older people are excluded from research altogether. Sometimes they are included but treated as a single, homogeneous group. And sometimes data collected from younger adults or the population as a whole is simply assumed to apply equally to everyone else.

The result is that a hugely diverse section of the population becomes difficult to see and genuine needs and inequalities are obscured. This has implications for people's health, independence and quality of life. But it also results in inaccurate representations of older people which can propagate ageist attitudes. It is these ageist attitudes, embedded everywhere in our society, that mean older people are insufficiently valued and so overlooked in research, data collection and data reporting in the first place. We’ve dubbed this a "cycle of invisibility".

Breaking this cycle means thinking about our older population – in research projects, in data collection and in product and service design. It means recognising that older people are not a single market, a single demographic group or a single life stage. And it means dismantling the damaging ageism embedded in our society. If we don’t, we will be ill-equipped to meet the challenges and opportunities of an ageing population and make the ill-founded claims of a looming calamity a reality.

Blog written by Aideen Young, Head of Research and Analysis at Centre for Ageing Better.

Read the report at Centre for Ageing Better: A Cycle of Invisibility: How Older People Are Overlooked in Data and Research

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