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My name is Alan Walker and I'm a Professor of Social Policy and Social Gerontology at
the University of Sheffield. That's the social science study of ageing.
Ageing is one of the great challenges to our society; people are living longer it means
they are claiming pensions longer, they're using health care and long term care for longer
periods. An ageing population means that the work force
is ageing; so employers in all organisations have to think more about sustaining working
life, rather than expecting there will be a flow of younger people.
So this is a really serious set of pressing questions that the NDA program is addressing.
The NDA was set up as the UK's first major research programme on ageing, from a multidisciplinary
perspective, with the goal of understanding how the dynamics of ageing are changing.
But secondly, how the research that emerges from the programme can be applied in practice,
to improve the experience of people as they age, and to help UK society to adjust to the
fact that it is an ageing society. It covers everything; from basic biology,
through to arts and humanities. One of the things I did was to establish what
I call 'grandly strategic partnerships', to find organisations that are going to have
a significant role in translating the research, from not just one project, but several projects.
The NDA programme is a wonderful multidisciplinary program, looking at all aspects of ageing,
and what it's done is provided incredible insights, evidence and new research which
helps us understand some of the big opportunities and challenges that an ageing population presents.
We at Age UK have a great partnership and collaboration with the New Dynamics of Ageing
and with Alan, and we are very fortunate in having a major conference together towards
the end of the year, where we will help disseminate those key findings to policymakers, practitioners,
individual older people - to ensure that the knowledge that's been created really has a
huge impact, not just for academics, but for practitioners and policymakers too.
Right from the start, impact has been at the heart of the NDA programme. It's built in
from the very beginning, and as a simple, personal commitment now I believe that publicly
funded research has to have some payback for society.
And what we've done, throughout the life of the programme, is to work with all of the
projects, to build capacity, to introduce them to systems that enable impact to be maximised,
to introduce them to people who are experts - who've done it and know how to do it, so
that they can learn from experience. I asked each of them to prepare an impact
statement, so that right from the beginning of their work they were thinking about 'when
I finish this and publish the results, what is going to be the impact on...' -- could
be policy, could be practice, it could be the development of new products.
A good example of that is the project headed by Andrew Newman, at Newcastle, which is focusing
on the visual arts and its role in the wellbeing of older people.
What we actually did was take a group of 30 older people - some who had prior engagement
with the arts, and some who didn't - to contemporary art galleries in the North East of England
over a three-year period. The benefit for older people for engagement
with art is primarily about identity. It's about being able to define who you are within
the context of broader society. One older lady, for example, had given up knitting before
she came into a care home. Through the exposure to the various art exhibitions
that we took her to, she actually took up knitting again. And this might, in itself,
seem like a fairly inconsequential thing, but what she was really doing was taking herself
back to her younger days, when she made clothes for her family. It's not necessarily about
a beautiful piece of art; it's about how you see yourself reflected in it. Engaging with
local authorities, the engagements with arts practitioners within major art organisations
has enabled us to change, or begin to change, the structure of this sort of work within
the arts sector. And without Alan this really wouldn't have
been possible, and it is Alan's approach, Alan's mentoring and Alan's support - it's
through that that we've been able to do what we've been able to do.
At the end of it, it has to have an impact on society that will lead to an improvement
in the experience of the ageing process. If we can genuinely transform the way that society
views the ageing process and the way that society thinks about older people, then that
will be the most rewarding thing that I could think of.