1. The Old Old Factors associated with a healthy life past the age of 75 John Stevens and Peter Baume Abstract Though the proportion of the Australian population which has entered retirement is steadily increasing, little research has separately investigated factors associated with quality of life among the oldest strata of the population. This poster details work in progress identifying factors associated with the health and life expectancy of people aged 75 and above. The research will highlight implications for health care and pensions policies, both for those who are advancing toward their later years and those who have long since past retirement age. English language proficiency As immigrants comprise a majority of the Australian population, a respondent’s English language proficiency and whether a respondent was born in Australia were obvious starting points for this analysis. First, and most importantly, respondents who have difficulty understanding English report being more ill than the general population over 75, with an alpha value of 0.2810 when a respondent’s difficulty understanding English is used as a predictor of health. This has important implications for the provision of interpreter and staff speaking patients’ own languages in the health services. The following table of health against a respondent’s difficulty understanding English. The number of years a respondent has lived in Australia does not effect health, and respondents born outside Australia report feeling only slightly healthier than those born in Australia. This finding may be influenced by strict health immigration requirements for successful visa applicants. Exercise Consistent with long-standing medical advice, we found in all 4 data sets that regular exercise improves health - more specifically - “a walk a day keeps the doctor away”. This can be seen in the following cross tab of how often a respondent walked outdoors for at least 15 minutes against health. Summary A respondent’s English language proficiency, educational qualifications (and by implication a respondent’s occupation) over their lifetime, as well as the exercise a respondent chooses to do in retirement all have important policy implications for health care systems. Data sets The data sets used in the analysis reported in this paper were: · Australian Longitudinal Study of Aging (waves 1-6) · HILDA (wave 1) · Australian National Health Survey (1997) British Household Panel Survey (waves 1 to 11) Biography John Stevens is a research officer at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine, UNSW and is a PhD student at the University of Essex, UK Peter Baume, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, UNSW is a retired medical doctor, academic and member of parliament and is currently the Chancellor of the Australian national university Education A respondent’s qualifications achieved over the previous 60 years have a negative effect on the self-assessed health of the respondent with a Cronburg alpha value of 0.3610. The following table highlights that people holding trade qualifications report the best health, implying that the respondent may have been active during her or his working life without being a subjected to the dangers of a manual job. Respondents with higher qualifications, which often implies that they worked in a less active desk job, report being less healthily in old age. The amount of time a respondent spends in full-time education has very little correlation with health. (The blank cells in this table are due to an inaccurate weighting variables for small counts)