The potential role of ecological health promotion in progressing healthy ageing

The economic and social implications of population trends make it an imperative for the aged care industry to develop frameworks to facilitate healthy ageing, the compression of disease and a more productive, active older population. Ecological health promotion delivered through a settings-based approach has been found to be a useful means to promote population health across a number of settings. Such an approach could offer both a framework to organize the many worthwhile strategies and practices being implemented for healthy ageing and a suite of concrete processes to engage stakeholders in such endeavors. In this regard, residential aged care facilities exhibit many of the characteristics of other settings such as schools and workplaces and, as such, should be developed as a health promoting setting. This paper asks whether residential aged care could become a health promoting setting for the ageing population?