While healthy ageing involves more than promoting health in a clinical or medical sense, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that physical and mental health are invaluable foundations for maximising the opportunities of life – including in older age. This is why the medical discipline of geriatrics continues to play an essential role in the Decade’s work to improve the lives of older people, their families and communities.
Over the last three decades, Aparajit B. Dey has worked to establish geriatrics as a distinct discipline of medicine in India through service development, training, and generating evidence through research. Aparajit B. Dey has played an active role in the country’s national initiatives to promote geriatric health care, including through guiding the roll out of the National Program for the Health Care of the Elderly in India and establishing geriatric medicine as a distinct and feasible specialisation for physicians through the National Medical Commission.
As a natural extension of this work, Aparajit B. Dey has also actively promoted the importance of establishing integrated, person-centred health and social care systems across the South-east Asian region. Orienting himself with WHO’s Integrated Care for Older People (ICOPE) framework, he has collaborated with the Kingdom of Bhutan and the Government of India to incorporate integrated care within their healthy ageing strategies. As a result, integrated care which places older people’s needs at the centre has seen increasing implementation within clinical practice in the region.
Geriatrics sometimes suffers from ageist stereotypes of being seen as an unattractive or unrewarding clinical discipline. Aparajit B. Dey shows us that it is possible to transform the way geriatrics is seen into an exciting and truly impactful field that foster healthy ageing for all – for current and future generations of older people.