Social, Behavioral, and Environmental Enablers for Healthy Longevity: A Workshop for the Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity Initiative

When: November 6, 2019 (1:00 PM ET) – November 8, 2019 (12:30 PM ET)

Where: AARP, 601 E St, NW, Washington, DC

This 2-day public workshop examined the social, behavioral, and environmental enablers for healthy longevity. Workshop participants discussed the challenges and opportunities, as well as potential solutions and disruptive approaches to enhance social structures that would enable healthier and socially fulfilled lives and ultimately create thriving societies around the world.

Specifically, this workshop featured invited presentations and discussions on topics including:

• Theoretical foundations and key concepts and definitions for healthy longevity;
• Existing evidence on the social, behavioral, and environmental enablers of healthy  longevity including determinants, pathways, and policy entry points;
• Critical challenges and gaps in current approaches for creating social and environmental structures that promote healthy behaviors across the life course and enable aging populations to lead productive lives;
• Key successes of policies and programs in targeting the social, behavioral, and environmental determinants of health related to healthy longevity;
• Opportunities, approaches, and potential priorities—including the consideration of data, indicators, and measures that should be collected—for designing and applying social, behavioral, and environmental enablers to guide effective multi-sectoral solutions and actions that foster integrative care without medicalizing these solutions; and
• Effective mechanisms for stimulating meaningful collaboration among various relevant stakeholders across sectors and disciplines.

Workshop speakers and discussants contributed perspectives from government, academia, private, civil society, and nonprofit sectors from the local to global levels.

This workshop is the first of three that will inform the Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity initiative, part of the National Academy of Medicine’s Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge.

For more information, contact Maureen Henry, initiative director, at mhenry@nas.edu.