Maximising your quality of life
How increasing your healthspan can improve your quality of life.
Maximising the number of years lived in good health
While life expectancy has increased dramatically over the last century, people are not living all of those extra years in good health.
Our research paper looks at the healthspan data and aims to address this growing gap between length and quality of life.
It highlights the changes that people can make to support their health, as well as their retirement.
Looking beyond life expectancy
Healthspan [or healthy life expectancy]
The number of years a person can expect to live in good health.Lifespan [or life expectancy]
The number of years a person lives.Healthspan gap
The difference between a person's lifespan and their healthspan due to factors like disease, injury and frailty.The implications of a widening healthspan gap
This is down to the poor lifestyle choices and mental health issues of employees. Furthermore, largely preventable chronic conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, are becoming more common. This means the healthcare system is facing mounting costs as well.
From this, it’s clear that improving our healthspan should be a top priority. The economic pay-off of reducing the healthspan gap is considerable. What's more, reversing the causes of the widening healthspan gap will allow the benefits to be sustained long into the future.
The widening healthspan gap in the UK
The good news is that better healthcare treatment and technologies have led to longer lifespans in the UK.
However, while life expectancy has grown by over five years since 1990, healthy life expectancy has grown at a slower rate. Partly due to lifestyle choices, this has led to a widening healthspan gap and lower quality of life. Currently the healthspan data shows that around 7.3 million healthy years of life are lost in the UK every year.
Prevention and behaviour change are the solution
To encourage healthy lifestyle behaviours and reduce metabolic risks, and ultimately increase healthspan overall, we need well-structured health strategies that combine treatment with prevention.
These should be a coalition of individual, corporate and governmental action. The positive consequences of improving healthspan will not just benefit the individual, but the collective, as it will have knock-on effects for the economy.
Our report highlights physical activity and a healthy diet as key actions. An encouraging health insurance plan can contribute here, too. To examine our reasons, as well as our proposed action points, read the full report.
"While life expectancy provides a measure of a society’s progress, it is our health span, the number of years we can expect to live in good health, that should demand our attention with a focus on quality of life."
- Professor Dame Carol Black
Expert Adviser on Health and Work to the Department of Health (England) and former Principal of Newnham College Cambridge