How health has changed in your local area: 2015 to 2020

The start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused widespread changes to health in England.

This included a worsening of personal well-being, mortality, mental health, and economic and working conditions, but also some improvements such as reduced air pollution and crime.

The Office for National Statistics has released a new edition of an interactive tool recently, showing how health changed in each local authority area across England between 2015 and 2020, according to the Health Index.

The Health Index gives every local area in England an overall health score for each of the past six years. This overall score is made up of a wide range of measures, including physical and mental health conditions like diabetes or anxiety, local unemployment, road safety, and behaviours like healthy eating.

This score can show whether health in a local area is improving. The Health Index score has a baseline of 100, which represents England’s health in 2015. A score higher than 100 means that an area has better health for that measure than was average in 2015, lower than 100 means worse health than the 2015 average.

If we take a look at Brentwood, you can see how health has changed over the past six years:

Health Index score for Brentwood: 111.1

Brentwood’s Health Index score decreased in 2020 and has an overall Health Index score of 111.1, which is down 1.5 points compared with the previous year. Brentwood’s best score across all subdomains is 118.8 for health relating to “behavioural risk factors” .

“Behavioural risk factors” looks at alcohol misuse, drug misuse, healthy eating, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, smoking and sexually transmitted infections.

The second highest scoring subdomain is “physical health conditions” – Brentwood’s score for health relating to “physical health conditions” improved from 99.4 in 2015 to 112.8 in 2020 – this means Brentwood went from being close to average among local authority areas to being among the best 10% across England for this subdomain. On top of this, Brentwood’s Health Index value for health relation to “physiological risk factors” (which looks at hypertension, low birth weight, overweight and obesity in adults, and overweight and obesity in children) is better than the score for England as a whole. To find out more make your way over to www.ons.gov.uk and search The Health Index for England.