New publication explores whether healthy life expectancy can be increased equitably in England

In 2018, the UK Government's Secretary of State for Health and Social Care articulated an ambition to increase healthy life expectancy by at least 5 years by 2035 for England, while also reducing the gap in life expectancy between the richest and the poorest groups within the population. Although the researchers responsible for this study (including IHI's Dr Rob Aldridge) express their doubt that England—or indeed any high-income country—could achieve this ambition, they propose a series of structural or policy interventions that create healthier physical, economic, digital, social, and commercial environments and therefore have the potential to make a major contribution to such a target as part of an expected new prevention strategy for England. 

The paper describes population-level interventions for four main contributors to decreased healthy life expectancy which increase the gap in life expectancy. The interventions can be grouped as targetting fiscal and economic, marketing and availability factors. Some examples include:

• Tobacco Control - reform current tobacco taxes to close price gap between manufactured and hand-rolled tobacco
• Alcohol control - restrict advertising and sponsorship to reduce exposure to children
• Food - increase availability of lower salt products and reduce availability of higher salt products 
• Physical Activity - tax to shift affordability to public transport and away from car use

To read the full paper visit The Lancet website.

The paper's full citation is: Marteau T, White M, Rutter H, Petticrew M, Mytton O, McGowan J, Aldridge R (2019) Increasing healthy life expectancy equitably in England by 5 years by 2035: could it be achieved? The Lancet 393(10191):2571-2573 . doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31510-7