It was Benjamin Franklin who said the only certainties in life are death and taxes.

None of us can escape our mortality. But what we all hope for is to age well and keep as free of serious illness as possible.

Inevitably some of that is down to our genes. But a lot can be affected by our lifestyles - what we eat and how much we exercise - as well as our income.

And don't think I'm just indulging in mind games. All these factors are key influences on how we all live - whether our economy is thriving, if our employers can recruit staff, whether we have enough carers and, of course, the pressures put on our health service.

Public health is one of the major services that the county council provides and the annual report is full of fascinating facts.

The latest census puts the population of Devon at 826,319 of whom 214,594 are over the age of 65 - well over a quarter. This compares with the national figures for England which show just over one sixth of the population are over 65.

And our residents are ageing at a faster rate than nationally too. If we look at the over 75s, then the proportion of the population in Devon is set to rise from 13.7 per cent today to 18.4 per cent in 20 years time. That, of course, presents all sorts of challenges for our health and adult care services.

We've always judged life expectancy as an indicator of whether we're getting healthier as a nation. How many times have you heard someone say "they lived to a ripe old age"?

Well health experts are moving away from that broad definition to one in which we judge whether people are ageing well. And the ambition should be for us all to live as long as possible in good health and compress the number of years we live in poor health.

The annual report has a number of suggestions as to how we do this.

Obviously one of these is to increase our promotion of healthy lifestyles by encouraging people to stay active - from just a walk around the neighbourhood every day to joining a ramblers' group or the village bowling or keep-fit club.

We must also encourage people to stay mentally and socially active as well by supporting the wealth of voluntary and community groups we have in this county who organise local activities. 

At a systemic level, we've got to maintain and improve on the high attendance we already have for national screening and immunisation programmes. We need to work together with our partners to increase the early identification and treatment of key health conditions such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and dementia as prevention is better than cure.

We're also going to develop a clear, agreed strategy to tackle dementia to build on the pioneering work we've already done with experts at Plymouth University and we're going to explore the adoption of Devon as a World Health Organisation Age-Friendly community.

These are just some of the actions we need to take as our younger people increasingly leave the county to find work and "affordable" housing and the birth rate continues to fall.

So the ratio of younger people to older people will reduce which will inevitably have an impact on our frontline workforce including carers, both paid and unpaid.

Currently across Devon, there are just over two working-age people to one older person. By 2043, we expect this to reduce to 1.7 working-age people. So there are some real challenges ahead.