Croí CEO Neil Johnson will attend a ‘Think Tank’ with the Global Coalition on Ageing on ‘Reframing Heart Failure’ – connecting heart failure to ageing as a driver for re-framing and re-imagining the condition. The increasing global prevalence of heart failure, driven by demographic ageing, highlights the urgency of raising the visibility and priority of this condition and the need to address it in new ways.
The global conversation on Ageing and Health holds more potential for achieving transformative change today than ever before, partly as a consequence of the new World Health Organization Ageing and Health Strategy and the Decade of Healthy Ageing: 2020-2030. One of the strategy’s top priorities is to address the growing societal and often self-inflicted ageism against older people; the strategy calls for a campaign to change this culture of ageism. In this context, cardiovascular conditions – with their close association with aging – are too often assumed to be a normal part of aging. While cardiovascular conditions like Heart Failure do in fact increase in prevalence with age, steps can be taken to prevent and treat and these conditions. By addressing this ageism and the stigma associated with many of the health conditions that increase with age – we can bring Heart Failure out of the shadows, more fully understand its impact, and encourage better detection, diagnosis and treatment.
Three Key Challenges in re-framing HF
- Heart Failure is not prioritized by key stakeholders because it is not well understood by those most affected, including patients themselves
- Heart Failure is often dismissed a normal part of aging, which results in patients falling victim to ageism – from society, healthcare providers and themselves
- Communication around Heart Failure is challenging because of the complexity of the condition.