Implementing A Life-Course Framework: Why Health Needs to Grow Up With Us
New (Helpful) WHO Guidelines
A new WHO blueprint calls on countries to re-design health systems around life’s chapters (one might even say Quarters). Some are showing the way.
A New Health Narrative
The World Health Organization (WHO) has just released one of its most ambitious documents in years: the Framework to Implement a Life Course Approach in Practice. It’s a mouthful of a title, but behind the jargon lies a quiet revolution.
For decades, health systems have been built to treat disease when it appears. Hospitals patch us up. Specialists zoom in on organs. Politicians obsess over waiting lists. But the WHO is now urging governments, communities, and citizens to zoom out: to see health not as episodic illness but as an evolving capacity, built—or eroded—across the entire course of our lives.
This is the shift from healthcare to lifecare. And it’s one the longevity economy, and elderberries readers, will instantly recognise as essential.
The Six Principles (Sans Jargon)
At the heart of the framework are six (deceptively) simple ideas. They’re not written for dinner-table conversations, but here’s how they might translate:
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