Minister of Health and Care Services Jan Christian Vestre has presented the government’s Health Personnel Plan 2040. It estimates that Norway could be short of 42,400 health and care workers by 2040.

The government’s answer is that older people should remain in their own homes for longer and manage more on their own. It sounds sensible. In practice, however, it risks shifting responsibility from the welfare state to individuals and their families.

There is a paradox at the heart of this debate. Medical and technological progress has enabled us to live longer than ever before. This is a collective achievement. Yet we have no coordinated national plan for the extra capacity, labour and funding that an ageing population will require.

Instead, much of the burden is quietly being transferred to relatives through unpaid care work. And that burden is not shared equally. Families with money, knowledge and strong networks are better able to organise good care. Others are left with far fewer options.

That risks undermining the Nordic welfare model from within.

Healthy older people are part of the solution

The first answer is prevention – and it needs to start decades earlier than it does today.

Poor health at 75 is rarely simply a matter of bad luck. For many people, it is also the result of a lifetime of physically demanding work, insufficient workplace adjustments and health problems that could have been addressed earlier.

The sooner we intervene, the healthier people are likely to be in later life – and the smaller the care burden will be in the future.

The second answer is to make far better use of a resource we already have: healthy older people themselves.

Norwegian employers say they are struggling to recruit, yet older workers still encounter age discrimination and informal pressure to retire. This is happening even though the general age limit was raised to 72 earlier this year.

The economic consequences are substantial. According to calculations by the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, Nav, if employees in Norway stayed in work for just one year longer on average, the annual economic gain to society would be NOK 40 billion.

That is roughly equivalent to the annual running costs of 30,000 to 40,000 nursing-home places.

Statistics Norway has also estimated the value of voluntary work in Norway at close to NOK 200 billion a year. Yet we are barely tapping the potential of older people to contribute.

And contributing matters for more than the economy. Having a role, being needed and staying socially active can in itself support better health and help reduce future care needs.

But this responsibility cannot simply be placed on individuals. It has to be built into our institutions and policies.

That is what I mean by responsible ageing: creating systems that make it possible for people to contribute for longer, rather than disguising a withdrawal of public responsibility as greater individual freedom.

Three things the government should do

I believe the government should commit itself to three concrete measures:

1. Make housing policy multigenerational. The Norwegian State Housing Bank should be tasked with financing housing schemes in which students and older people live alongside one another. Students could pay lower rents in return for companionship and practical help in everyday life.
2. Introduce a senior skills guarantee. Older employees should be given real opportunities to use their experience for mentoring, training and knowledge transfer. They should not be pushed out of working life – or onto disability benefits – simply because their bodies can no longer cope with the same tasks as before.
3. Make age-discrimination reporting mandatory. Employers already report on gender and ethnicity, but not age. Organisations tend to improve what they are required to measure. Without greater transparency and accountability, a senior skills guarantee risks remaining little more than a good intention.

When the government allocated more than NOK 3.5 billion to Eldreløftet, Vestre said that older people should be seen as a resource.

Now the government needs to show that it means it.

Older people do not need more iPads on their kitchen tables. Norway needs a society that makes use of the skills, experience and creative capacity of its older population before the social contract between generations is weakened beyond repair.

This article was first published in Aftenposten on 5 August 2026.

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