About the “Compendium of Age-Friendly Measures“:
For the last nine months a team of researchers associated with the Age-Friendly Institute has collaborated to develop a first of its kind “Compendium of Age-Friendly Measures.” The goal of this effort has been to collect – in one central place – the various measures being used to track outcomes of interest associated with age-friendly practice and found in existing age-friendly frameworks. At present, the compendium contains over 130 measures drawn from an exhaustive review, led by Dr. Kim Dash and our team here at the Institute, who surfaced measures from Age-Friendly practice frameworks including Age-Friendly Cities and Communities, Age-Friendly Health Systems, Age-Friendly Public Health Systems, Age-Friendly Employers, and Age-Friendly Universities. Our research was supplemented by a review of measures found across a wide variety of additional resources that are outlined in the document which can be accessed HERE.
Key features of the Compendium include:
- A listing for each unique measure found in our review of Age-Friendly Practice and Frameworks, along with its accompanying measure source;
- Links to any accessible data sources (i.e. data attached to specific measures that program managers and researchers can access);
- Identification of the frameworks from which the measures surfaced during our research;
- Alignment of each of the measures with one of the six characteristics of an Age-Friendly Ecosystem.
About the Six Characteristics of an Age-Friendly Ecosystem:
In 2020 and 2021 more that 50 leaders from over 25 organizations and 6 countries who are working to advance age-friendly initiatives in public health, health systems, community, academia and employment came together to discuss shared characteristics and measures in their work. We worked as a group to surface shared characteristics – or ways of describing — a multi-sector age-friendly ecosystem and employed a carefully structured process to draw out these characteristics so that they would be recognizable to practitioners across settings. From this work emerged six shared characteristics of an age-friendly ecosystem, which we describe as:
-
- Responsive
- Healthful
- Equitable
- Engaging
- Active
- And Respectful
Recognizing that practitioners want (and need) flexibility in how to assess progress in efforts to live up to these characteristics, alignment with specific measures helps provide a roadmap. For example, if you want to quantify the presence of Responsiveness in the Age-Friendly Ecosystem where you are working, you could look to specific Measures aligned with that characteristics as a way to do so.
Using this Compendium:
The Compendium can be downloaded as an Excel File HERE.
Practitioners will rightly pick and choose appropriate measures for their own work and we ask that you help us add to this compendium.
We sincerely welcome your feedback and improvements to this work. Please email: info@agefriendly.com
Special thanks to: Shreya Chandra, Tim Le, Kim Dash, Jennifer Phillips and Terry Fulmer for their support of this project.