Lead change for healthy ageing in your community

An older patient leaves your clinic with three chronic conditions and no plan for what happens at home.

A daughter who has been caring for her father for four years is never asked how she is coping.

A 52-year-old woman comes back a fourth time with joint pain and broken sleep, and nobody asks when her periods stopped.

People are living longer almost everywhere.

Health systems need to change.

This programme puts you in direct contact with people who work for health, from all over the world, and supports you to do something about it in your own setting within two weeks.

Ageing is not one story.

It is at least two, and they are usually told separately.

In high-income systems the problem is fragmentation and cost.

A patient is discharged, and the health service, the social care service, and the housing service do not speak to each other.

Nearly 50% of older people in high-income countrieswho need care remain at risk of poverty after public support is counted.

In low-income and middle-income countries the problem is that there is often no system to fall out of.

In Nigeria, more than 70% of health spending is paid out of pocket, and there is no functional national policy for the care of older persons.
In Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers found that older people preferred public clinics, and that only 3.2% of them actually used one, because of cost.
In India, 75% of older adults live with at least one noncommunicable disease, only 18% hold health insurance, and roughly half were unaware that the old-age pension existed.

Two things are the same in both settings.

Care is held up by unpaid family caregivers, mostly women, many of them in midlife themselves.
And older people are routinely treated as less worth the effort, which is what ageism means in practice: pain filed under normal ageing, treatment thresholds set by birth date, decisions taken over someone’s head.

Women over the age of 49 are a specific blind spot.

Health systems were designed around the reproductive years, so the transition that shapes cardiovascular and bone health for the next decades is rarely recorded, taught, or budgeted for.

How peer learning certification works in this programme

You write first, then read, then act.

The cycle repeats in every course.

We ask you a question about your actual work. For example, what is the biggest problem facing older people in your area, and what happened the last time you met it?
You answer from experience, in enough detail that a colleague in another country can picture the room. Nobody is grading what you write.
You read what colleagues elsewhere wrote and give them structured feedback against a published rubric. They do the same for you. A community health worker in a rural village and a hospital physician can both earn certification, because we certify tangible progress in both learning and action. And everyone can contribute.
You commit to one change you will make after earning certification. If you are ready to lead change, you join TGLF’s Impact Accelerator, a peer support system to help you make progress, faster and better, with colleagues from all over the world.

There are no lectures and no video walls of talking experts.

The primary text is your experience, combined with the experience of others.

This collective intelligence provides problem-solving capability that no individual, no organization can achieve alone.

Who is this for?

No formal qualification or specialisation is required. You simply need to be working for health in your community.

Nurses, midwives, and physicians can use this programme to bring ageing into their daily work and into their organisations.
Community health workers, who are often the only contact an older person has with the health system, can use it to strengthen support to families and to better report patterns upward.
Managers and policymakers can use it to fix what their data does not currently show, since older adults are frequently missing.
Researchers and educators can use it to translate science and knowledge into practice, and improve science by paying attention to the local knowledge of practitioners and listening to the needs of communities.

If the topic is new to you, the first ageing primer is written in plain language and asks for nothing you cannot do this month.

If you have worked on ageing for years, the value is in the comparison across health systems, in the life-course and decolonial framing of why social protection is thin in much of the Global South, and in colleagues who will argue with you productively.

Where to start

AGEING-EN-001 Our shared challenge of ageing: a primer for health workers. You reflect on how older men and women actually move through the health system where you work, examine one instance of ageism in your own setting including your own assumptions, and plan one action for the next two weeks. Case studies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Germany, India, Japan, and Nigeria give you something to compare your context against. Germany shows what a social insurance model for long-term care does and does not solve. Japan shows reablement and gerontechnology in one of the oldest populations in the world. Completing it earns a certificate and opens the full programme.

AGEING-EN-002 Menopause, with Menoglobal. Produced with the first international organization dedicated to making menopause a global health priority. It treats menopause as a bio-psycho-social event rather than a hormone chart, and compares the medicalized approach common in wealthy countries with settings where women have neither support nor vocabulary. Menoglobal works from both ends at once, apex down with WHO, the World Bank, and employers, and ground up with communities. This course is the ground-up half, because breaking the silence happens locally or not at all.

Evidence and policy base

The programme follows guidance that governments have already signed up to: the WHO Decade of Healthy Ageing 2021 to 2030 and its four action areas, the WHO Global report on ageism (2021), the WHO Global strategy and action plan on ageing and health (2017), the United Nations Principles for Older Persons (1991), and the IFRC Healthy Ageing Strategy and Operational Framework 2030.

Healthy ageing is a track inside the Certificate peer learning programme for health equity in research and practice.

Participants often continue into our programmes on decolonizing global health, gender in emergencies, women inspiring women, climate change and health, or artificial intelligence in global health and humanitarian response.