Queen Salote of Tonga is probably the first television image that many people people in their 70s and beyond remember. People in their 50s and 60s are much more the television generation and although most households acquired a television in the decade after the coronation radio was still very important. Forces Favourites, Music While You Work, Mrs Dale's Diary and the Archers, and their introductory music played an important part in our lives. but television was even more influential and the stirring sounds of Dr Finlay's Casebook evokes memories of Sunday evenings and stories that illustrated the importance of empathy and humanity as well as medical technology because of course Drs Finlay and Cruickshank had few effective treatments they could call upon.
The Optimal Ageing Programme is a for people who are ageing, that is people from 40 on, including people with one or more long term conditions. it will of course be not only voice but also visual, Tele-vision rather than television which implies a television set. increasingly the tele-vision, that is seeing people at a distance will be on a computer or a phone (no-one calls them smartphones any longer) or an Echo Show and of course television sets are also now 'digital' so increasingly people will be looking at the Internet on their TV screen. It is important to remember that Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the Internet said in 2000 that his ten year ambition is that one would use the word 'the Internet' by 2010 and we are moving to a world in which 'internet access' will just be like electricity, something that we take for granted. Indeed part of our mission is to help everyone 70 plus get online, as they still say, by 2023
The Optimal Ageing Programme at Oxford is designed to transform the way we think about ageing and contribute to the creation of a new culture in which
- everyone is clear that as you live longer you need to become more active, not less
- the NHS provides activity therapy as well as drug therapy, operative therapy and psychological therapy for everyone with long term conditions
- everyone will be online just as everyone has electricity
- the preventability of dementia and frailty will be accepted as high priority by individuals and society
- the positive contribution of older people will be increasingly appreciated
- Neil Bacon; Neil was working as junior doctor in the John Radcliffe Hospital at Oxford in Dave Sackett's team when he decided to do something about the fact that doctors had to pay to use email so he set up Doctors Net UK which continued to flourish long after email became 'free' for everyone because it was a community. He then set up www.iwantgreatcare.org one of the first services to collect patient experience and ran that for ten years. His main focus currently is as a Professor for digital health at the University of Exeter
- Peter Brambleby; Peter is a doctor who specialised in public health and has done many jobs to has a Director for Public Health and nationally where he was part of a team developing programme budgeting. he is still working part time as a consultant in public health. However his main mission now is the development of a wood near Harrogate as a health and wellbeing service
- Muir Gray is a public health doctor who has been working on understanding and modifying the challenge of living longer better for fifty years. He set up the Optimal Ageing Programme in 2015
- Alastair Tulloch; Alistair qualified in Aberdeen in 1950 and was a GP in Bicester with a particular interest in population ageing. he is particularly interested in the health of people 85+
the technical team consists of Tom Futter Ruth Brice and Anant Jani
So lets get going; the revolution starts here