Billionaire Philanthropists Pour US$400 Million into Initiatives For Weak and Vulnerable

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Shelley Lyford President and Chief Executive Officer of West Health, the Gary and Mary West Foundation, and the West Health Institute.

Growth in Population of Weak and Vulnerable

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the world is on the brink of a demographic milestone. Since the beginning of recorded history, young children have outnumbered their elders.  In about 5 years’ time, the number of people aged 65 or older will outnumber children under age 5. Driven by falling fertility rates and remarkable increases in life expectancy, population aging will continue, and even accelerate. The number of people aged 65 or older is projected to grow from an estimated 524 million in 2010 to nearly 1.5 billion in 2050, with most of the increase in developing countries.

Impact of Aging Population

As these trends occur, key questions arise:

- Will population aging be accompanied by a longer period of good health, a sustained sense of well-being, and extended periods of social engagement and productivity, or will it be associated with more illness, disability, and dependency?

- How will aging affect health care and social costs?

- Are these futures inevitable, or can we act to establish a physical and social infrastructure that might foster better health and wellbeing in older age?

- How will population aging play out differently for low-income countries that will age faster than their counterparts have, but before they become industrialized and wealthy?

These are important questions which require answers, and sooner than later.

Billionaire Philanthropists Gary and Mary West

For Gary and Mary West, what started as an entrepreneurial journey in 1978, when they co-founded a small telemarketing company in the garage of their house in Omaha, Nebraska, turned into the multi-billion $$ American telecommunications company / success story, the West Corporation, employing close to 36,000 people

As wonderful an entrepreneurial success story as that was, what happened next is an equally fascinating story, where this amazing couple has taken major parts of their fortune, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in supporting causes, including, but not limited to, senior citizen wellness and cutting the health care costs for the elderly.

Shelly Lyford, West Health and Gary West Foundation

Shelley Lyford is President and Chief Executive Officer of West Health, the Gary and Mary West Foundation, and the West Health Institute.

Solely funded by the philanthropy of Gary and Mary West, West Health is a family of non-profit, nonpartisan organizations dedicated to lowering healthcare costs to enable seniors to successfully "age in place" with access to high-quality, affordable health and support services that preserve and protect their dignity, quality of life, and independence.

With a master’s degree in international relations and political economics from the University of San Diego, Ms. Lyford has played a critical role in establishing the Gary and Mary West Foundation in 2006, and under her leadership, has to date rewarded grants totalling more than $223 million  for applied medical research, policy initiatives and community support and social services for seniors and their caregivers.

Ms. Lyford also leads the Gary and Mary West Health Institute as it conducts research on a wide range of healthcare issues affecting seniors and their families.

Ms. Lyford has spearheaded the development of innovative healthcare delivery ecosystems that serve as national care models of excellence, including the Gary and Mary West Senior Emergency Care Unit at University of California, San Diego Health, California’s first nationally-accredited senior-specific emergency department, and the Gary and Mary West PACE organization in north San Diego, a set of gold standard programs, which help seniors age in place, rather than in a nursing home. Additionally, she oversaw the development of the first of its kind, non-profit Gary and Mary West Senior Dental Center to ensure low-income seniors have access to high-quality, affordable dental care integrated with health and wellness services.

Ms Lyford has been involved in setting up many of the organization's research initiatives and collaborations including those with the American College of Emergency Physicians, the American Geriatrics Society, Brown University, Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Duke University, Meals on Wheels America, Mount Sinai Health System, UC San Diego Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2019, Ms. Lyford was appointed for a three-year term as a commissioner on the California Commission on Aging, advising the state’s governor and legislature, along with federal, state and local agencies, on issues, policies, and regulations that affect California’s seniors, and subsequently appointed to California’s Master Plan for Aging Stakeholder Advisory Committee.

Ms. Lyford also serves as vice-chair of the board of directors for CivicaRx, a not-for-profit generic drug company helping patients by addressing shortages and lowering the high prices of lifesaving medications.

Prior to her work with Gary and Mary West, Ms. Lyford was a director at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. She currently sits on the Executive Committee of Grantmakers in Aging.

On this episode of ideaXme we will hear from Ms. Lyford about:

- Her background and fascinating path from growing up on a dairy farm in Vermont to running the West Health network of organizations

- The Gary and Mary West story and why they developed their charitable focus on seniors and aging

- The biggest challenges today facing seniors including the themes of "aging-in-place", geriatric emergency care, and senior oral health

- How the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted seniors and aging

- How Tele-Health has emerged as an important option during the pandemic and thoughts about the importance of Tele-Health now and into the future for senior care and monitoring

- The California Master Plan for Aging

- The blossoming cost of prescription drugs and what can be done to bring prices down

- Her overall recommendations for reforming the healthcare system and her outlook for aged-care

 Interview Credits: Ira Pastor ideaXme life sciences ambassador.

This interview is in American English.

Contact the founder of ideaXme here: [email protected]

If you liked this interview you might also enjoy our interview with George MacGinnes who heads a £98 million research and innovation program supporting the UK Government’s Ageing Society Grand Challenge to ensure that people can enjoy at least 5 extra healthy years.

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