Dr Anna Dixon, Chief Executive at the Centre for Ageing Better, examines the issues around an ageing population, how we have reached this stage and offers potential solutions to the problems it presents. Her book, The Age of Ageing Better? turns the misleading and depressing narrative of burden and massive extra cost of people living longer on its head and shows how our society could thrive if we started thinking differently. She presents a refreshingly optimistic vision for the future that could change the way we value later life in every sense.

There are several advantages of Bevan’s design, such as progressive funding through taxation and equity of access regardless of income, that we must not lose sight of as we celebrate the NHS’s (National Health Service) 70th birthday. However, there remain historical fault-lines dividing health and social care. The challenge is how to preserve equity if a more radical reform were implemented to fully integrate both the funding and delivery of health and social care. Funding from national taxation with defined entitlements could preserve both equity in funding and geographical equity. This does not solve the issue of the pull to the centre, which has been a feature of the NHS throughout its history, according to Klein. This will require a fundamental shift in the use of data. Data must be wrenched from the hands of the regulators and put back in the hands of those who generate them for the purposes of improvement.

The challenges facing European health systems have changed little over 30 years but the responses to them have. Policy ideas that emerged in some countries spread to others; however, the way policies were implemented and the impact they have had has been shaped by specific national contexts. Comparative policy analysis has evolved in response to this, moving away from simple classifications of health systems and crude rankings to studies that try and understand more deeply what works, where and why. For policymakers interested in how other countries have dealt with common challenges, it is important that they avoid the naïve transplantation of policy solutions but understand the need to translate policies to fit the institutional context of a particular country. Policies that cross borders will necessarily be shaped by the social and political institutions of a country. These dimensions should not be ignored in comparative research. The next decade will require health systems to deliver improved care for people with complex needs while at the same time delivering greater value. Policymakers will benefit from looking backwards as well as to their neighbours in order to develop appropriate policy solutions.

This paper compares the introduction of policies to promote or strengthen patient choice in four Northern European countries – Denmark, England, the Netherlands and Sweden. The paper examines whether there has been convergence in choice policies across Northern Europe. Following Christopher Pollitt's suggestion, the paper distinguishes between rhetorical (discursive) convergence, decision (design) convergence and implementation (operational) convergence (Pollitt, 2002). This leads to the following research question for the article: Is the introduction of policies to strengthen choice in the four countries characterised by discursive, decision and operational convergence? The paper concludes that there seems to be convergence among these four countries in the overall policy rhetoric about the objectives associated with patient choice, embracing both concepts of empowerment (the intrinsic value) and market competition (the instrumental value). It appears that the institutional context and policy concerns such as waiting times have been important in affecting the timing of the introduction of choice policies and implementation, but less so in the design of choice policies. An analysis of the impact of choice policies is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is concluded that further research should investigate how the institutional context and timing of implementation affect differences in how the choice policy works out in practice.

The psychology of aging includes a variety of theoretical perspectives, methodological conventions, and techniques and targets of application. Psychological aging-related processes include phenomena from such disparate domains as neurological, sensory, physiological, physical health, mental health, cognition, personality and affect, social, family, interactional, and coping and adjustment. Canadian researchers actively contribute to these and other research topics and professional issues. We summarize a broad and inclusive model of the psychology of aging and highlight some of the ways in which Canadian research and training reflects and advances numerous pertinent scholarly agendas.

The implementation of choice for patients over where and when they are seen by specialists in hospital outpatient clinics has been supported by electronic referral systems in England and the Netherlands. This paper compares the implementation of ‘Choose and Book’ in England and ‘ZorgDomein’ in a region of the Netherlands. For England the analysis draws on national data and published studies on ‘Choose and Book’, national patient surveys, and qualitative data based on general practitioner (GP) focus groups. For the Netherlands the analysis draws on qualitative data collected during observational study as well as survey data among patients, GPs and medical specialists. We find that despite significant differences in the genesis and design of the policy, similar challenges have been faced. The electronic referral systems have forced changes to the process of care at the interface between primary and secondary care and standardisation between practices. Although these changes have the potential to generate improvements and benefits, for example, convenience, certainty and choice for patients and efficiency gains through for example reduced do not attend rates, repeat consultations and duplicative diagnostic tests; they have also generated problems during implementation including GP resistance. Policy ambitions for patient choice may not be realised if the implementation of the booking system is not carefully designed and evaluated.