Can the new women’s health strategy deliver the improvement in healthy life expectancy it has set out to achieve?

The newly published women’s health strategy sets out three overarching measures of success to improve the health of women in England, which include a specific aim to "improve healthy life expectancy in the poorest regions to a minimum of 61 years”. The timeframe isn’t clearly stated, but the context is the 10-year plan. Healthy life expectancy represents the average time someone can expect to live in good health across their lifetime.  

The chart below shows how this ambition compares with recent trends in healthy life expectancy for women, comparing the most deprived and least deprived 10% of the population.

Healthy life expectancy at birth for the three-year period from 2022 to 2024 in the most deprived areas of England was 48.2 years, compared with 68.5 years in the least deprived areas. This is a decline since previous years – back in 2013 to 2015 the comparable figures were 52.2 years and 71.3 years respectively. The ambition for the strategy would require an average gain of 12.8 years of healthy life for women in the most deprived parts of the country: an exceptional ask in the context of recent decline.

Lower healthy life expectancy in more deprived areas occurs for a number of reasons. People in more deprived areas are more likely to develop health conditions at a younger age, in part due to adverse social determinants of health, and greater exposure to risk factors such as smoking, poor diet and physical inactivity. People may also be less able to manage their health conditions, due to factors linked to worse financial security, employment and access to housing and public services, meaning that individuals are more likely to report being in poor health. 

Improving healthy life expectancy to the level anticipated in the women’s health strategy would require concerted action across national and local government to address the impact of economic and social disadvantage.

Within the 117 separate actions set out in the strategy, there are some – such as supporting women and girls to be more active – that address underlying causes of poor health. But the evidence that these could collectively turn around health life expectancy is not provided. While some of the individual actions can reduce ill health, and improve the health service experience for women, it seems unlikely the ambition to improve healthy life expectancy can be achieved.