InHALE -
Inequalities in Healthy Active Life Expectancy: the role of time, place, person and methods
The UK, as most other countries, has seen remarkable increases in life expectancy over the last century. However life expectancy does not truly reflect the health of our ageing population. Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) adds a quality dimension to life expectancy and indicates how many remaining years are expected to be healthy ones. It is already known that life expectancy and HLE at birth and at age 65 vary considerably across England and Wales. Through three sub-projects our research will explore the reasons for these inequalities, specifically addressing:
- How life expectancy and HLE at different ages in local authorities changed between 1991 and 2001, and the extent to which the changes were explained by variations in area-level social factors (deprivation, ethnic minority levels, unemployment, etc).
- The relative contribution of individual-level social, health and lifestyle factors to inequalities in HLE and which transitions (onset of ill-health, recovery, mortality) they affect.
- The evaluation of different methods for calculating HLE from cross sectional and longitudinal data and, in particular, which methods are most robust when there is missing data or when the time intervals between interviews are unequal.