High Level Summary of Statistics Trend Last update: Friday, May 16, 2008
Life Expectancy and Healthy Life Expectancy
Life expectancy, the number of years that a person can expect to live on average, is a single measure of population health which is used to monitor public health, health inequalities, the outcome of health service interventions and to allocate resources.
Life expectancy at birth for Scots continues to improve, and recent trends show a slight narrowing of the gap between males and females to under 5.0 years in 2006 (males now having life expectancy at birth of 75.1 years compared with 80.0 years for females). However, life expectancy in Scotland remains low compared with most Western European countries. In terms of quality of life, healthy life expectancy at birth (based on a combination of life expectancy and self-assessed health (SAH)) has also increased over the longer term but at a slower rate than the increase in overall life expectancy. The gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy is greater for women than for men, suggesting that they spend more years of life in poor health.
Healthy Life Expectancy in deprived areas is considerably lower than that in Scotland overall. In the most deprived 15% of areas in Scotland in 2005/06, healthy life expectancy at birth was 57.3 years for males and 59.0 years for females. The Scottish Government has established a National Indicator to increase healthy life expectancy at birth in the most deprived areas.
Source: NHS Information Services Division (ISD Scotland)
Method: abridged life tables (LE calculations based on Chiang (II) methodology; HLE based on the Sullivan method), using
a) GROS mid-year population estimates
b) GROS death registrations (using year of death, not registration)
c) self-assessed health (SAH) reported as good or fairly good, from the General Household Survey (GHS) (1980-1996, 1998) and the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) (1999-2002, 2005, 2006).
Please note that these surveys are for ages 16+, and therefore the SAH for ages 16-19 is used for age groups 15-19, 10-14, 5-9, 3-4 and 0-2 (for GHS analyses); and 15-19, 10-14, 5-9, 1-4 and <1 (for SHS analyses).
Note that the LE and HLE estimates for 2000 differ from estimates published previously, due to the use of different age groupings and the introduction of weighting into the SHS SAH data used here.
The methodology used to calculate healthy life expectancy estimates is currently under review and estimates may be revised in future.
Further Information