The increased demands upon formal and informal care support for the large and rapid growth in global aging is one of the world’s greatest unmet needs. Recent population data and projections show the inexorable rise in the aging of the global population. While there is variation in the population percentages across countries, many regions will see a doubling of people aged 65 and over between 2012 and 2050. Population aging has major consequences for the informal and formal care of older people and as we have seen in a recent related Research Topic, serious economic consequences for individuals and governments. To fulfil the WHO’s goal of healthy aging requires a multidisciplinary health and social care workforce with formal training at successive levels of expertise who can collaborate with informal caregivers of friends and family to provide accessible, person-centered, and high-quality care. The care needs of older people are often driven by poor chronic disease prevention, management, and multimorbity, which in turn has consequences for the social aspects of healthy aging. As well as increased total numbers of the health care workforce, we also need a workforce that is skilled in the prevention and management of chronic illnesses and distributed geographically to give access to all older adults.
The juxtaposition of increased demand for care and decreased availability of a trained workforce raises several pertinent issues, including workforce education and distribution, models for healthcare payment to providers and health professions students, innovations in long-term care systems, use of technology to aid and expand workforce performance, and education and assistance models for informal caregivers. This Research Topic aims to bring together the latest data, current analyses, and innovative models related to the formal and informal workforce caring for older adults now and in the future. The goal is to provoke thinking about what could be done by educators, community and health organizations, social service agencies, and policymakers, among others, to maximize the capacity and competency of the future healthcare workforce in every country to meet the needs of the growing population of older adults.
We welcome submissions on the following topics, but not limited to:
• Projections of demand for aged care, gerontology and geriatric medicine specialists in each discipline by country or region;
• Analysis of the adequacy of current approaches to training the health and social workforce to deliver the services required for the older population of the future;
• Evaluation of curricula content for educating health professionals of various disciplines to care for older adults;
• Models to train informal carers to care for older adults in terms of content, delivery modality, and ongoing support;
• Use of technological innovations to support health professionals in caring for older adults who reside in remote areas;
• Use of technological innovations to enhance ongoing support and quality of care for older adults with chronic conditions, including impact on capacity of workforce;
• The economic costs to deliver services to older people in both urban and rural settings;
• Aged care service access and workforce availability;
• The influence of payment and resource models on workforce availability.
Keywords: Health and social care workforce, workforce training, geriatric medicine, interdisciplinary education, informal caregivers, aged care and health service costs, health workforce shortage, population ageing, chronic diseases, multimorbidity, projections for
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
