General information
During a workshop on Sept 4, 2012 “Prolonging working life in good health and with high productivity in older workers in Europe”, Perosh partners expressed their willingness to collaborate on:
- determinants of a prolonged healthy productive working life;
- interventions promoting a prolonged healthy productive working life.
The ultimate outcome of the present project is to jointly tender for FP7/Horizon2020 calls on these issues. Secondly, the present project may contribute to the harmonization of new projects or cohorts on ageing of the different perosh partners.
With respect to determinants, focus will be on:
- determinants of a prolonged working life while maintaining good health and high work productivity;
- differences in determinants between younger and older workers.
With respect to interventions, partners are interested in different types of interventions that support the prolongation of a healthy and productive working life.
Scientific relevance
Due to increasing life expectancy and decreasing fertility rates, Europe is ageing. Ageing increases the pressure on the public finances and, together with the financial crisis, already forced several European countries to raise the statutory retirement age. At the same time, high productivity and innovation of companies is mandatory due to the global competition, and a (qualitative) shortage of workers is expected in some sectors. Hence, there is a societal need for workers to extend their working life while maintaining good health and high productivity. This raises the question how this can be supported.
Many gaps in our knowledge still exist with respect to determinants of the prolongation of a healthy productive working life and cost-effective interventions, and differences between groups of workers, e.g. differing by age or health status.
Practical/societal relevance
Developing knowledge on determinants and interventions/policies on sustainable employability of (older) workers is highly relevant to workers that will have to extent their working life in future, employers that need productive and innovative workers and can no longer rely on large groups of new workers entering the labor market, and public finances of European countries. Since most countries in Europe are ageing, joint research to create synergies and to avoid duplication is especially important.
Methods
In this project, two seminars will be organized initially. The first one-day seminar will consist of two sessions, one on determinants and the other on interventions. The seminars will be used to (1) exchange knowledge and methods, and (2) further specify and establish collaboration between (a selection of) the partners.
The deliverables of the seminars, in addition to exchanging knowledge will be clearly specified by the partners taking the lead before the seminar. The content of the second seminar will be determined during the project.
Ms Goedele Geuskens, TNO, goedele.geuskens@tno.nl
Related pages
Perosh research challenge publication on Sustainable employability to prolong working life
