Women are sicker but men die quicker

On Tuesday 6th January CARDI launched a grants programme to support research in planning for demographic change. The grants programme has two overarching principles: working across disciplines and across the island of Ireland to meet the needs of older people and our ageing population (www.cardi.ie/grantprogramme).

This programme aims to advance the ageing research agenda in Ireland by stimulating research into the urgent, complex and as Robin Webster, Director of Age Action, reminded us at our December showcase event, the very personal issue of ageing (www.cardi.ie/userfiles/conference.doc).  We know that one million people aged 60+ now live on the island of Ireland and in coming years, the largest increase will bein the ‘older old’ - the number aged 80+ is expected to triple by 2031.

However while life expectancy has increased, it is not clear that life without disability and ill health has increased to the same extent. Evidence from the European Health Expectancy Monitoring Unit report indicates that in Ireland 50% of women will experience poor health post 65. While men’s life expectancy is lower, their health is slightly better (but they are more likely to be hospitalised than women), hence “women are sicker but men die quicker”. (www.cardi.ie/publications/ehemucountryreportshealthexpectancyinireland)

Researchers across all disciplines have the opportunity to use their skills and knowledge to help plan for the type of society we want to live in now and in the future, not just concerning areas such as health and social care but also engineering, technology, housing, transport, economics, planning and others.

It is exciting to find the high level of interest across Ireland in this programme and a growing understanding of CARDI as a facilitator of ageing research. We are being increasingly contacted to share information and to signpost  the ageing research community in Ireland; we now have  over 160 researchers’ details registered on our site (www.cardi.ie/research/researchers).

Briefings on the programme were given by CARDI’s Strategic Research Officer Paul McGill, in Limerick, Coleraine, Jordanstown, Galway, TCD, UCD and Dundalk and we have received a high number of email enquiries and telephone calls. To enable the sharing of the common questions and answers from Call 1 we have added the questions and answers to our website - http://www.cardi.ie/grantprogramme

The closing date for applications is Monday 9th March 2009 at 12 noon

Thanks for visiting the CARDI blog. This is where the CARDI staff team will write about new research and the latest developments with CARDI.

I hope that our efforts to develop an ageing research blog will stimulate some thoughts.

Thank you for your interest.

Roger O’Sullivan

Director

CARDI