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Enterprise and Culture Committee, 16 Jan 2007

16 Jan 2007 · S2 · Enterprise and Culture Committee

Item of business

“Growing older and wiser together—A futures view on positive ageing”

Lord Sutherland: Watch on SPTV

The report did not focus on that in detail, so there is no special set of research evidence, but I am happy to give you my tuppenceworth if you want. I chaired a sub-committee in the House of Lords that produced a report called "Ageing: Scientific Aspects". One of that report's points of focus was the way in which research can play a part in dealing with some of the issues that you have raised. In broad-brush terms, two points have come out of that inquiry. The first is that huge advances are taking place in science, which I will illustrate by looking back. When I was a young man—which is probably before most of this committee's members were young—if somebody had an ulcer, they were in hospital for three to four weeks, a part of which was spent in intensive care, and then in bed at home for another three to four weeks. Now, they take a little pill every day and that deals with the same complaint. Tuberculosis provides another example. There were sanatoria all round my part of Scotland because the air was supposed to be clear and pure and people spent months and months there. TB is always grumbling away in the background and there are separate issues with it, but those are two examples of illnesses that have been dealt with through the advance of research. It will be quite some time before Alzheimer's and dementia have that status, but there is change already. It is not the case that patients either have Alzheimer's or do not, because it can be contained and slowed up—all sorts of things can happen. Stem cell research is important to that, because it is one of the ways in which faster advance will be made.Another thing that we discovered in the inquiry is that—to our mind, at least—there is no wholly clear and rigorous test of what a healthy life expectancy is. It is assessed on the basis of answers that people give to the census or the household survey. If I had had to fill one of those in over the past two weeks of weather, the researchers would have been given a sombre view of what the population felt. The census and the household survey basically ask, "How do you feel?" and then healthy life expectancy predictions are based on the responses. That is highly subjective. We made a bit of an issue of that and we are looking for different measures. We think that the way to approach the matter is not through the subjective measure of asking people how they feel—I can tell you from experience that everybody who is older feels a bit slower—but through the capacity for independent living. That is a much more objective measure and will, I think, settle your question about how far people are capable of making a wider contribution to the community.There are two issues: science and finding a good measure of whether periods of ill health are extending.

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Enterprise and Culture Committee, 16 Jan 2007

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