Between the period 2012-2014 and 2022-2024, healthy life expectancy fell from 62.9 years to 60.7 years for men and from 63.7 years to 60.9 years for women, several years before retirement age, according to this study published on Sunday.
This is about...a key indicator of population health, which offers a more complete picture of health in the United Kingdom than life expectancy alone"Who did she stay behind?" overall stable", according to the Health Foundation.
This indicator represents the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health, based on current mortality rates and respondents' self-reported health status. The decline began in several regions before the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Better than the EUnited States, but less well than most high-income countries
“Our analysis is unequivocal: healthcare in the United Kingdom is deteriorating and now lags behind the majority of comparable countries.”“,” laments the Health Foundation. Among 21 high-income countries, the United Kingdom fell from 14th to 20th place between 2011 and 2021, according to the Health Foundation, which relies on figures from the WHO (World Health Organization). Only the United States now has a lower healthy life expectancy.
In most of the country, "On average, we can now expect to spend part of our lives in poor health before reaching the legal retirement age."The Health Foundation points out that the legal retirement age is currently 66 and will gradually be raised to 67.
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Poverty and limited access to healthcare are key factors explaining this decline in life expectancy.
Inequalities within the United Kingdom are striking. In Richmond, an affluent suburb west of London, healthy life expectancy is 69.3 years for men and 70.3 years for women over the period 2022-2024.
But in Blackpool, one of the poorest towns in the country, in northwest England, it does not exceed 50.9 years for men. The decline in healthy life expectancy shows that successive British governments " did not take the necessary measures", criticizes the organization, which calls for " the reconstruction of the health system British.
The United Kingdom has the highest obesity rate in Western Europe, according to the OECD.
The public health service, the NHS, is mired in a deep crisis following a long period of austerity and the Covid pandemic. Improving health must now be an absolute priority", emphasizes Andrew Mooney, one of the study's co-authors, who calls for a " New strategy to combat growing economic and health inequalities.
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