In parts of Kent, people are dying years earlier than they should. In our poorest neighbourhoods, life expectancy is nine years lower among males and six years lower among females, compared to the wealthiest areas, according to Fingertips.
Thriving communities need all the right building blocks of health in place, such as good-quality jobs and homes, access to education, transport and healthy food, and adequate income and resources. Erosion of these building blocks causes instability in people’s lives and increases their risk of poor health.
What are the building blocks of good mental and physical health?
Also known as the social (or wider) determinants of health, they are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.
The Deprivation and poverty page on the Kent County Council website contains headline findings for Indices of Deprivation 2019, a financial hardship toolkit, children in poverty report, fuel poverty bulletin, and information about homelessness. The Economy and employment page contains statistics about businesses, earnings, unemployment, and benefit claimants.
Life expectancy is not the only way to measure the someone’s health or the quality of their life, but it can provide some insight into where there are inequalities, which are often caused by wider determinants. We have produced a short report on life expectancy in Kent, focusing on the inequalities between coastal and non-coastal areas. We found that people living in coastal areas of Kent die 2.1 years earlier than people in non-coastal areas on average, and the main causes of death of that explain this difference are chronic lower respiratory diseases, lung cancer and diseases of the liver.
The Labour market profiles from NOMIS include the latest figures on employment, earnings, benefits, occupation and industry sector.
The Fingertips website, produced by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) contains a profile of indicators related to the wider determinants of health. There are topics on natural and built environment, work and labour market, vulnerability, income, crime and education. Local crime statistics can also be accessed from Police.uk.
