Paul Farmer

speaker

419 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 8 Aug

Paul Farmer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Desert Island Discs · Paul Farmer, charity leader · 8 Aug 2026 podcast

So huge challenge and I

really wanted to to walk into that challenge and see if I can make a difference.

I think when I w started to really think about this job and the cause of ageing, first of all I immediately realised how little I'd really thought about it.

I just made a a sort of flat pack set of assumptions that you'd unpack at some point around me and Claire being together

doing all the kinds of things that you do in retirement, but never had a conversation about it.

But of course, as soon as you start thinking about that, you think about all the other older people who are in all kinds of different spaces.

You've got people who are

Despite the fact that people think that all older people are wealthy, there's so many people who face significant poverty.

And although we're living for longer, we're not living more healthily for longer.

I think there's a lot of reasons.

There seems to be good recognition that diet, lack of exercise, the sort of pressures of modern life mean that we don't have the level of health that we did in a previous generation.

As we age, there are some conditions which almost inevitably are more likely to come on, so you're more likely to have challenges with your

your eyesight or your hearing or dementia, which is the one of the biggest challenges that we face in later life.

And that impacts on the idea of healthy life expectancy.

So we have to think about what we should do.

And all of us, I'm encouraging all of us to do this, to think about our own health.

So there's things we can do, but we have to tackle it because the consequences for the health

service of a population that is increasingly unhealthy are huge.

I think we should keep the idea of the contribution that older people make to society.

We should drop the idea that when you reach a certain age you should just sort of sit in a corner and be quiet, and I think we should keep the idea of connection and we should drop the idea of loneliness and isolation being almost inevitable.

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