The Dr. Matthew Tayback Conference on Public and Community Health for an Aging Society will be held on Wednesday, December 17, from 9 AM to 5:30 PM in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, rooms 9 and 10, with a subsequent dinner reception. This is a biennial conference that is cosponsored by the JohnsHopkinsCenter on Aging and Health, the Baltimore City Health Department and the Baltimore City Commission on Aging and Retirement Education. It is named in honor of Dr. Matthew Tayback, who was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins for many years, in geriatric medicine as well as biostatistics and international health, and was the first Commissioner on Aging for the State of Maryland.

The purpose of this conference is to bring scientific evidence and best practices about pertinent issues that impact the health and well-being of older adults, from a public health perspective, together with the experience of need in our city and city-level program development, and through this to identify approaches that could be implemented by the city of Baltimore and thus serve as a model that would be applicable to other cities.

The focus of this conference will be on social isolation and aging. This topic was determined by prioritization of the overall blueprint for public and community health for older adults that was developed during the 2006 conference. Key parameters related to social isolation will include: disaster preparedness, medical self-management issues, barriers and facilitators of social engagement strategies and environmental problems.

We hope that you can join us. Please let us know, and we will provide additional directions and other information for those who are able to attend. Please RSVP your availability to Ms. JoAnn Snell at email jsnell5@jhmi.edu as soon as possible.