Study title

Between 1991 and 2001, the census question underlying the calculation of disability free life expectancy (DFLE) changed, which initially made it impossible to follow over time how DFLE on a local area level had changed. The main issue here was that the 1991 question led to a wide underreporting of disability and with that an overestimation of DFLE. To solve this problem, we have developed DFLE estimates for local areas in the UK in 1991, aligned to 2001, borrowing strength from national surveys. The dataset contains DFLE by five year age groups up to 85+ for men and women and all UK local areas for 1991 in 2001 geography.

The UK, as most other countries, has seen remarkable increases in life expectancy over the last century. However life expectancy does not truly reflect the health of our ageing population. Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) adds a quality dimension to life expectancy and indicates how many remaining years are expected to be healthy ones. It is already known that life expectancy and HLE at birth and at age 65 vary considerably across England and Wales. Through three linked work packages this project will explore the reasons for these inequalities, specifically addressing: how life expectancy and HLE at different ages in local authorities changed between 1991 and 2001, and the extent to which the changes were explained by variations in area-level social factors (deprivation, ethnic minority levels, unemployment, etc) the relative contribution of individual-level social, health and lifestyle factors to inequalities in HLE and which transitions (onset of ill-health, recovery, mortality) they affect. The third work package will focus on evaluating the different methods for calculating HLE from cross sectional and longitudinal data and, in particular, which methods are most robust when there is missing data or when the time intervals between interviews are unequal.