In my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, where hydrologists predicted water might run out within a decade, an elderly couple stunned me to silence near a decorative fountain jetting up a geyser at their gated enclave in the foothills.
A&E target waiting times have not been met for a year, and are at the worst levels for more than a decade; and elderly, vulnerable patients are marooned in hospital because our colleagues in social care have no money or staff to provide much-needed services at home.
Compared to previous decades, the elderly population today is much more predominant in Canada and continues to rapidly increase due to longer life expectancy and the effects of the baby boom generation [ 1- 3].
In the next decades the elderly population will increase dramatically, demanding appropriate solutions in health care and aging research focusing on healthy aging to prevent high burdens and costs in health care.
If these changes develop slowly and are part of a normal, ie, nonpathological aging process over decades, most elderly progressively adapt to the loss of high-level tactile performance and learn to compensate by developing behavioral strategies such as relying stronger on visual control to cope with the challenges of a visually dominated environment.
They are plays that ask for the audience's close collaboration in making believe as the performers go through their transformations, from being actors offstage to characters onstage in "Life," and through the last decades of one elderly Southern woman and her chauffeur in "Driving Miss Daisy".
Porter said that extra council tax-raising powers would not bring in enough money to alleviate the pressure on social care and that councils will not receive most of the new funding in the Better Care Fund until the end of the decade, but services for elderly and vulnerable people are at breaking point now.
Most unsettling, somehow, for me, is the still image of Allen reconstituted as a speakeasy gangster, the "tough hombre" remembered by an elderly waiter decades after the event.
Over the next few decades the ratio of elderly dependants to people of working age will rise steeply, from 10% now to 40% by 2050.
Mr. Obama made his rare weekend appearance on Capitol Hill as part of an all-out effort to rally Democrats to support the biggest health care legislation since the creation of Medicare for the elderly four decades ago.
