For a second year, as the Decade of Healthy Ageing began in 2021, the In ConversationIFA Virtual Global Caféfeatured a stimulating set of speakers from around the world on a wide range of topics related to aging and longevity. While the COVID pandemic continued to be a backdrop context for most of the conversations, the variety of subject matter had been well covered in the pre-pandemic world and no doubt will for the foreseeable future.
Examples of topics found less in mainstream conversation ranged from Doulas for Older Persons in Palliative Care Settings with Marian Krawczyk, Lecturer in Health & Social Policy (End of Life) University of Glasgow, to “Social Justice, Racial Harmony and the Contributions of Older People” with Suresh Rajan, President, Ethnic Communities Council of Western Australia; and Rural Aging Sustainability with Andrea Holzner Gerontologist, Speaker on Rural Aging, Portland Oregon.
Today I feature below three of the best from the nearly fifty Global Café sessions that stood out for me in 2021, not to diminish the value of the depth of content from all the other amazing speakers. These three are not in order of importance but rather by date. Access to the Facebook videos of each speaker are in the headings below.
Barely entering the end of the first year of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Upshur gave one of the best overviews of how we should understand and respond to public health policies and ethics in pandemics, and even today most of his talking points still hold up for further discussion. I would like to see him back again on the IFA Global Café sometime soon as we are currently still in the midst of this pandemic. What have we learned since his conversation with us?
One of the comments Upshur made was about the early COVID catchphrase “flattening the curve”; as he prompted – what would have been a better goal at the beginning? Whatever is decided, (if this isn’t a truth as he suggested), it’s about articulating a goal properly. Somehow I think, we are still stumbling along with that issue all over the world.
This conversation with Lisa Levin – “Ontario Senior’s Care Beyond COVID-19” has lost none of its relevance today, as we are still talking about the crisis in Canada, in the provincial Long-Term Care (LTC) systems in Ontario and other provinces such as Quebec. In fact, only last week, the Quebec coroner’s inquest into long-term care home deaths during the pandemic’s first wave resumed.
Levin’s discussion was clear and level headed, representing only one of countless presentations on LTC that I sat in on last year. Check out the detailed AdvantAge July 2021 response to the final report of Ontario Long-Term Care COVID-19 Commission, which is shared on this IFA Global Café resource tab.
After participating in the IFA 2021 November conference session on Social Prescribing and reading further on the subject as defined in writings from The King’s Fund in the UK, I looked forward to the Global Café discussion with Simon Bottery to hear more about how the UK fits the system, we in Canada call Long-Term Care, under the broad umbrella term Social Care.
Bottery presented eight critical issues within the UK system of LTC and four ideas for change, which are comparatively similar to what we experience in Canada and other parts of the world.
MinorSide Note. On April 3rd, 2020 the IFA started these Friday morning sessions as the IFA Global Town Hall. In March 2021 it changed to Global Café thanks to a whimsical suggestion by myself in the Zoom chat box. Thanks IFA Secretary General, Jane Barratt for (as she often says) “taking it on board” and running with it. Here’s to more stimulating conversations in the Global Café 2022.
