Health Index for England 2020

Thursday 10 November 2022 5.30am

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its Health Index 2020 for England yesterday, 9 November 2022.  This data gives a rich insight into aspects that affect the health of both individuals and communities and helps to understand what is driving changes at local authority and integrated care system level. 

It is split into three categories (domains): Healthy People, Healthy Lives and Healthy Places.  These can be further broken down to focus on health topics (subdomains), such as mental health and economic and working conditions. Each subdomain consists of a set of specific measures such as obesity, alcohol misuse and air pollution.

Some headlines for Herefordshire in 2020, compared to the baseline of England’s health in 2015:

• Scores significantly better on “behavioural risk factors”, “crime” and “living conditions”, and improvement between 2019 and 2020.
• “Economic and working conditions” also significantly higher but deteriorated from 2019.
• “Mortality” score fell between 2019 and 2020 and is now similar to the baseline.
• “Personal wellbeing”, “protective factors” and “mental health” all deteriorated from the previous year and are all now worse than the baseline.
• Lowest scores are for “physical health conditions” and “access to services”, with no significant change between 2019 and 2020 and scores for both remaining markedly lower than the England 2015 baseline.

Many of these reiterate key findings of Herefordshire’s 2021 joint strategic needs assessment (JSNA), but there is a lot to digest in the methodology and underlying data.  These will inform topic updates over the coming months, alongside OHID Fingertips and 2021 Census data releases.

If you’d like to find out more, you can explore the Health Index yourself using the interactive tool on the ONS website.