Ageing population changes skills requirements for public health teams

Changing age profile will have implications for how we consider long-term conditions such as dementia and this will have implications for the environment we need to create for older people. At the moment, we may not have enough understanding around these issues, and therefore potentially not the skillset to support wider work with dementia.

Similarly, the level of training around dementia/ageing is quite under resourced and we have not dealt properly with the dementia burden.  Ideally, this would mean an increase in the number of public health consultants and specialists who have expertise in this area.

There would also need to be a focus on understanding the size and scale of the problem, and in particular around identifying risk and responding to it: we know, for example, that among those with low physical activity prevalence of dementia is higher. It will also mean greater connections with other teams, contrasting with the sometimes ‘silo-ed’ approach of the past.

Some of the information in this section is provided by stakeholders and expert groups, and does not necessarily represent the views of the CfWI.