Program and Speakers

11th LifeCourse Prevention Summit 2026

Ageing as a Design Problem: Building Systems That Deliver Across the LifeCourse

Copenhagen, from 3-5 December 2026 | Organised by the LifeCourse Prevention Initiative of the Excellence in Pediatrics Institute

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How do we design systems that allow people to live longer lives with function, purpose, and independence — and what goes wrong when they don't?

Populations across Europe and globally are living significantly longer. Yet the systems on which those lives depend — health and care systems, housing, cities, transport infrastructure, labour markets, retirement frameworks — were largely designed for shorter ones. The result is not merely a clinical challenge. It is a systems design failure: predictable, cumulative, and in many cases preventable.

The 2026 Summit takes this as its organising premise. Prevention is necessary but insufficient on its own. Well-being in late adulthood is the outcome of decisions made decades earlier, across multiple sectors and systems. Understanding why those systems fail, and how they can be redesigned, is the defining policy challenge of ageing societies.

Scope and Framing

The Summit addresses ageing as a design and systems problem, spanning:

• Health and care systems
• Housing and urban environments
• Transport and mobility
• Work, retirement, and economic security
• Consumer technology and service design

It positions prevention not as a health expenditure to be justified, but as system infrastructure — an investment whose returns are long-term, cross-sectoral, and measurable in function and participation, not only in clinical outcomes.

The Summit will also examine two concrete proof points where system failure becomes most visible and most costly: equity in access to prevention across the lifecourse, and lifecourse immunisation as a case study of fragmented, age-siloed policy.

Programme Structure

The Summit runs across two days, with five structured two-hour policy meetings preceded by two opening lectures. Each policy meeting follows a structured format: expert scientific briefings establish the evidence base, followed by policy interventions from organisational and advocacy representatives, and a facilitated action plan discussion oriented toward concrete, implementable recommendations.

Opening Lectures

Thursday 3 Dec 2026 from 09:00 – 11:00

Opening Lecture 1: Designing for 100 — Why Longevity Demands a New Systems Logic

This lecture introduces the summit's central provocation: that societies are living longer lives inside systems designed for shorter ones. It reframes ageing not as a clinical challenge to be managed, but as a design and systems failure to be understood and corrected. It introduces the pillars of well-being in late adulthood — function, autonomy, participation, and economic security — and makes the case that late-life failure is predictable and preventable, not accidental. It also establishes why a science-policy interface is the appropriate setting for this conversation: the evidence exists; the gap is in translation and system design.

Opening Lecture 2: From Child Health to Lifecourse — Why Prevention Must Start Early or It Will Not Work at All

This lecture establishes the intellectual continuity between early-life determinants and late-life outcomes, and introduces the LifeCourse Prevention Initiative as a bridge between pediatric and adult health. It sets out the two-day arc of the Summit — Day 1 as the framework, Day 2 as the evidence — and positions the sessions that follow as a structured attempt to move from system diagnosis to policy design.

Day 1: Why Systems Fail

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▷ Policy Meeting 1: The Architecture of Well-Being — What Systems Must Deliver and When

Thursday 3 Dec 2026 from 11:30 – 13:30

This session translates the framing of the opening lectures into a structured policy challenge. Well-being in late adulthood is not achieved at older age, but it is built across decades, in health systems, housing, cities, transport, labour markets, and retirement frameworks. The session examines what those systems must deliver, when they must deliver it, and why late-life cost explosions are best understood as symptoms of earlier design failure rather than inevitable consequences of ageing.

Expert briefings address

• Defining well-being in late adulthood: function, autonomy, participation, and trust as measurable objectives
• How early- and mid-life exposures shape late-life outcomes: the lifecourse epidemiological evidence base
• Prevention as infrastructure: the economic and fiscal case for long-term system investment
• What city and regional innovation models, including emerging longevity hub frameworks, reveal about the conditions for successful system redesign

Policy interventions and action plan discussion focus on:

• How prevention can be repositioned from a health expenditure to a system design imperative in the EU and national policy
• What cross-sector governance mechanisms can align health, urban, labour, and social policy around long-term well-being objectives
• How to measure system performance in terms of function and participation, not only disease burden

▷ Policy Meeting 2: A Taxonomy of System Failure — Why Well-Designed Policies Still Fail in Practice

Thursday 3 Dec 2026 from 14:30 – 16:30

This is the intellectual centrepiece of Day 1. Having established what systems should deliver, this session examines why they consistently do not. The organising argument is a reframing: what appears to be individual non-compliance, clinical failure, or population health decline is, in most cases, a system failure in disguise. This session names and analyses the principal drivers of that failure — not to assign blame, but to identify where intervention is possible, and policy leverage is greatest.

Expert briefings address:

• Short-termism in public budgeting and its long-term health consequences: the political economy of prevention
• Sector silos in practice: how health, social care, labour, and transport systems fail to communicate, and what those cost
• Inequity as a design feature, not a downstream problem: how gaps in access are built into systems from the outset
• The gap between innovation and adoption: why new tools and interventions consistently fail to reach the populations that need them most

Policy interventions and action plan discussion focus on:

• What institutional reforms can break silo logic in the EU and national health systems
• How to redesign accountability and feedback mechanisms so that prevention failures are visible — and attributable — before they become crises
• What role can patient and citizen advocacy play in holding systems accountable for design failures?

▷ Policy Meeting 3: LifeCourse Futures — What Happens If We Continue as We Are?

Thursday 3 Dec 2026 from 17:00 – 19:00

Day 1 closes by translating the framework into concrete futures. This session uses demographic projections, fiscal modelling, and regional innovation evidence to show what the accumulated cost of design failure looks like by 2040 and 2050. It also introduces the concept of system readiness — distinguishing regions and health systems that are building the capacity to serve ageing populations well from those that are not — and identifies the most immediate and actionable entry points for change.

Expert briefings address:

• Demographic projections and the coming fiscal pressure on health and social systems across Europe
• The compounding cost of inaction: modelling the long-term returns of prevention investment across the lifecourse
• System readiness and regional innovation: what longevity hub models reveal about the policy and institutional conditions for success

Policy interventions and action plan discussion focus on:

• What is the minimum viable policy change that would redirect even modest investment toward lifecourse prevention infrastructure
• How to build durable political will for long-term health investment across electoral cycles
• What are the most critical leverage points for EU and member-state action before 2030

Day 2: Where System Failure Becomes Visible

Day 2 opens with a short bridging address connecting the Day 1 framework to the two sessions that follow. The argument is direct: systems designed poorly fail first at their points of greatest vulnerability. Equity and lifecourse immunisation are not separate topics, but they are the most measurable and most actionable expressions of the failures examined the previous day.

▷ Policy Meeting 4: Equity Across the LifeCourse — Why Access Fails in Practice

Friday 4 Dec 2026 from 09:00 – 11:00

Equity failures in health prevention are rarely knowledge problems. The evidence on what works is substantial and widely available. It is a system incentive and design problem: healthcare systems consistently fail to implement equity principles even when they are formally committed to them, because those principles sit downstream of structural decisions that were never made with equity in mind. This session examines how cumulative disadvantage across the lifecourse produces inequitable health outcomes in later life and identifies the institutional and governance reforms needed to make equitable access a real and measurable objective.

Expert briefings address:

• Equity as cumulative exposure: how early-life disadvantage compounds across decades to produce late-life health inequality
• Structural and organisational barriers to equitable access: evidence from Europe and beyond
• Trust, communication, and community engagement: why institutional approaches to equity so often fail and what works instead
• Insights from co-designed interventions in underserved communities: evidence from practice

Policy interventions and action plan discussion focus on:

• How to hardwire equity into the design of new programmes and services, rather than retrofitting it afterward
• What institutional and governance reforms are needed to make equity a measurable, accountable system objective
• How to rebuild trust with communities and populations where systems have repeatedly failed to deliver

▷ Policy Meeting 5: Lifecourse Immunisation — Closing the Policy Gap

Friday 4 Dec 2026 from 11:30 – 13:30

Immunisation has a clear lifecourse trajectory, a strong evidence base, and effective prevention tools at every age. Yet no unified policy framework exists across age groups. Programmes remain fragmented by age category, disconnected across care settings, and inconsistently resourced. This session treats that gap as a direct case study of the system failures identified on Day 1: siloed age-based policies, short-term planning horizons, delivery that fails at points of greatest vulnerability, and equity that is assumed rather than designed.

Expert briefings address:

• The immunisation lifecycle: from maternal and infant vaccination to adult and older adult programmes — the evidence for integration and the cost of fragmentation
• Respiratory disease across the lifecourse: burden, prevention tools, and the policy gap in RSV, influenza, and SARS-CoV-2 immunisation
• Equity in immunisation: which populations are consistently left behind, why, and what structural changes are required
• Health technology assessment for vaccines across age groups: why current methodologies undervalue lifecourse prevention and how they must evolve

Policy interventions and action plan discussion focus on:

• How to move from fragmented age-based vaccination programmes to an integrated lifecourse immunisation strategy at EU and national levels
• How to embed immunisation equity into programme design from the outset, not address it as an afterthought
• How lifecourse vaccination can be positioned as a foundational pillar of pandemic preparedness and long-term health security