Driving Force: Increacing Healthy Life Expectancy

Description:

Life expectancy is the average number of years remaining for a living being (or the average for a class of living beings) of a given age to live. Life expectancy is also called average life span or mean life span, in distinction to maximum life span.

Healthy life expentancy is the amount of years people in a certain (WHO member) country spend in a healthy fashion. According to [2], years of healthy life lost due to disability represent 18% of total life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa, and decreases to around 8% in the countries with the highest healthy life expectancies, a list lead by Japan (followed by Australia and France)

"Globally, the male-female gap is lower for [healthy life expentancy] than for total life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy increases across countries at a faster rate than total life expectancy, suggesting that reductions in mortality are accompanied by reductions in disability. Although women live longer, they spend a greater amount of time with disability. As average levels of health expenditure per capita increase, healthy life expectancy increases at a greater rate than total life expectancy."[2]

As people get older, their needs change rapidly. In 1960, people worked longer than not. On average in 2006, retirement lasts 10 years longer than the average time spend working. Besides the heavy strains on pensionfunds and the healthcare system in general, this offers oppurtunities for a wide variety of businesses.

Enablers:

Medicine

Inhibitors:

People's need for communication and information

Experts:

L. A. Gavrilov
N. S. Gavrilova
C. D. Mathers PhD
R. Sadana DS
J. A. Salomon AB
C. J. L. Murray MD
A. D. Lopez PhD

Resources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
2. Healthy Life Expectancy in 191 countries, 1999 - Colin D Mathers et al (World Health Report 2000)