« Previous | Contents | Next »
Listen
1. INTRODUCTION
PUTTING HEALTH IMPROVEMENT AT THE HEART OF GOVERNMENT
Our goal for Scotland is better health for everyone and a narrowing of the health inequalities gap. We set out our vision for Scotland in 2020 in Improving Health in Scotland: The Challenge: 3
'A thriving Scotland with appropriate working, housing and living conditions, less smoking, healthier eating, more activity in daily life and less binge drinking, producing an improvement in quality of peoples' lives, enhanced wellbeing and increased life expectancy for all men and women, fewer early deaths from heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Individuals and organisations taking more individual and corporate responsibility, with more people living their lives in good health both physically and mentally.
All Scotland's children have a positive expectation of appropriate housing, education, community and family life with the aim of maturing into positive, confident and productive citizenship.'
The Challenge provided us with a strategic framework to support the processes required to deliver a more rapid rate of health improvement in Scotland, and that is what we are achieving. Our aim is to foster good health throughout life and good progress has been made: we have banned smoking in public places; we have Hungry for Success ensuring our schoolchildren get access to healthy meals; life expectancy for men and women has risen; there are fewer premature deaths from heart disease and cancer; and our national rates of suicide are decreasing. But so much more needs to be done if we are to achieve our vision.
When we outlined our spending proposals for 2005-2008 in Building a Better Scotland4 - we set challenging and demanding targets for improving our nation's health in the short term. We set ourselves a clear objective:
Working across Scottish Executive Departments and with other delivery partners to improve the health of everyone in Scotland and reduce the health gap between people living in the most affluent and most deprived communities.
And we set two targets for measuring our progress:
1. Reduce the mortality rates for those aged under 75, between 1995 and 2010 by health improvement action to tackle diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption and by action to ensure early detection and improved access to treatment and care: cancer - 20%; coronary heart disease - 60%; stroke - 50%.
2. Reduce health inequalities by increasing the rate of improvement across a range of indicators for the most deprived communities by 15%, by 2008. (The range of indicators has been selected from the 23 recommended indicators of health inequality. For adults - coronary heart disease, cancer, adults smoking, smoking during pregnancy, and for young people - teenage pregnancy and suicides in young people.)
In the Annex to this report, you will find charts which illustrate our progress against these targets. We update these annually and the substantial improvements in Scotland's health can clearly be seen.
In November 2005, the Cabinet reaffirmed the top priority given to improving health and tackling health inequalities - that is why the Scottish Executive has put them at the very heart of its business. Every Minister and every portfolio has a strong interest in how health improvement can help them achieve their overall aims, and in how achieving their aims can also help improve Scotland's health. We are taking a cross-cutting and whole-government approach to health improvement - putting health improvement in all our policies, and seeking to support all our policies by improving health. This report is designed to illustrate this approach. It focuses first on four key cross-government themes and their relationship to health improvement - Closing the Opportunity Gap, growing our economy, boosting educational achievement and promoting sustainable development to secure our future. It attempts to show their interdependency and to illustrate this through examples of action by the Executive and its partners. We know for instance that a growing economy requires a healthy and active working population - and that being in work is good for people's health and sense of wellbeing. We also know that healthy children and young people do better at school, that children and young people who have had a good breakfast find it easier to concentrate - and educational achievement leads in turn to better health and wellbeing.
We need this cross-cutting approach because people do not fit neatly into policy pigeon-holes, nor do the organisations and the services which support them. Closing the Opportunity Gap for instance, needs joined-up action on regenerating communities, education, employment and health - policies and services need to be joined up at national and local level to support people and achieve our goals. That is why we are committed to the role of community planning, ensuring that all local partners plan effectively and jointly to respond to meeting the needs of local communities.
This report illustrates progress and actions on health improvement and how it contributes to the key cross-government themes above. It also charts progress and signals future actions under the main health improvement programmes which the Cabinet continues to prioritise. Case studies show how people are being supported to make healthier choices which make a real impact on the quality of their lives. We hope this report will be useful in tracking our progress and that of our partners, highlighting good things which are happening and which can be more widely adopted, and continuing to encourage activity by all our partners - and with the people of Scotland - which takes us closer to our shared goals and our vision for Scotland in 2020.
« Previous | Contents | Next »