Active aging professionals know that lifelong learning is important for helping older adults maintain independent and fulfilling lives. With new medical advancements and health technology improvements happening nearly every day, it will come as no surprise that lifelong learning is equally important for active aging professionals themselves. In fact, the doubling time of medical knowledge continues to decrease-from 50 years in 1950, to 7 years in 1980, to 3.5 years in 2010, to a projected 0.2 years (just 73 days!) in 2020.

Lifelong learning for providers is identified by the US Department of Health and Human Services' National Quality Strategy as one of the defining principles for workforce development. And the World Health Organization's Global Health Workforce Alliance advises that "for health workers to provide quality care and meet their communities' changing health care needs, they must become lifelong learners dedicated to updating their professional knowledge, skills, values, and practice."

Lifelong learners will find important new resources that address ways to keep older adults well-nourished on Abbott Nutrition Health Institute's recently launched website. The impetus for ANHI’s new website is quite simple: We are keenly interested in understanding what nutrition problems healthcare professionals are working to solve, and we are equally interested in helping solve those problems. Further, the new ANHI website provides lifelong learners opportunities for:
• Empowerment - offering nutrition science that healthcare professionals can digest on their own and apply to their clinical practice;
• Collaboration - creating opportunities to connect healthcare professionals with experts who advance nutrition science; and
• Innovation - supplying healthcare professionals and their patients with unique, innovative, science-based nutrition resources.

https://www.anhi.org

Hakim Bouzamondo, divisional vice president and head of Global Research & Development of Abbott's nutrition business, explains, "Abbott Nutrition Health Institute is a kind of window of Abbott on the world. It helps us to communicate our science to healthcare professionals but also helps us to interact with healthcare professionals to make sure the best science is offered and conveyed to their patients."

The ANHI website, which continues to offer lifelong learners access to hundreds of free continuing education courses, now includes these new features as well:
• Enhanced search functionality
• Calendar of all live events
• "Meet the Expert" videos
• Podcasts
• Printable nutrition materials that healthcare professionals can share with their patients.

"The Abbott Nutrition Health Institute just celebrated its 10-year anniversary," says Roger Bird, president of US Nutrition. "And beyond that, Abbott has been improving lives through the power of nutrition for almost a hundred years. At Abbott Nutrition, we're incredibly proud of our scientific heritage and the quality of the work we do to assist our healthcare colleagues."

Good nutrition is important for healthy aging, and ANHI's new website can provide innovative and emerging nutrition information, knowledge and technologies to help healthcare professionals better support active aging among their patients and clients.

Amie N. Heap, MPH, RDN
Director, Abbott Nutrition Health Institute
Director, Health Policy, Education & Alliances
www.anhi.org