Abstract
BackgroundLife expectancy has been increasing during the last century within the European Union (EU). To measure progress in population health it is no longer sufficient to focus on the duration of life but quality of life should be considered. Healthy Life Years (HLY) allow estimating the quality of the remaining years that a person is expected to live, in terms of being free of long-standing activity limitation. The Joint Action on Healthy Life Years (JA: EHLEIS) is a joint action of European Member States (MS) and the European Union aiming at analysing trends, patterns and differences in HLY, as well as in other Summary Measures of Population Health (SMPH) indicators, across the European member states.MethodsThe JA: EHLEIS consolidates existing information on life and health expectancy by maximising the European comparability; by analysing trends in HLY within the EU; by analysing the evolution of the differences in HLY between Member States; and by identifying both macro-level as micro-level determinants of the inequalities in HLY. The JA: EHLEIS works in collaboration with the USA, Japan and OECD on the development of new SMPHs to be used globally. To strengthen the utility of the HLY for policy-making, annual meetings with policy-makers are planned.ResultsThe information system allows the estimation of a set of health indicators (morbidity and disability prevalence, life and health expectancies) for Europe, Member States and shortly their regional levels. An annual country report on HLY in the national languages is available. The JA: EHLEIS is developing statistical attribution and decomposition tools which will be helpful to determine the impact of specific diseases, life styles or other determinants on differences in HLY. Through a set of international workshops the JA: EHLEIS aims to develop a blueprint for an international harmonized Summary Measure of Population Health.ConclusionThe JA: EHLEIS objectives are to monitor progress towards the headline target of the Europe 2020 strategy of increasing HLY by 2 years by 2020 and to support policy development by identifying the main determinants of active and healthy ageing in Europe.
Highlights
Life expectancy has been increasing during the last century within the European Union (EU)
The methods and means to meet this aim include: computational and web methodologies for the European Health and Life Expectancy Information System (EHLEIS) database; statistical and demographic analyses for the substantive results; linguistic methods for the translation/provision of the easy-to-use web facilities in multiple European languages and translation of the Country reports into national languages; and methodologies to address the conceptual basis of the Healthy Life Years (HLY) indicator and its greater comparability with Summary Measures of Population Health in the United States of America (USA) and Japan
Two work packages are totally devoted to these activities using a wide range of statistical methods at the European, national, sub-national and individual level to perform macro, micro or multi-level analyses, respectively, with the aim to explain trends over time in life and health expectancies and gaps between Member States, genders and socio-economic groups using amongst others health expectancy decomposition tools [25]
Summary
Life expectancy has been increasing during the last century within the European Union (EU). Healthy Life Years (HLY) allow estimating the quality of the remaining years that a person is expected to live, in terms of being free of long-standing activity limitation. The HLY is technically a Summary Measure of Population Health and part of the family of disability-free life expectancy indicators which measure the number of remaining years that a person of a certain age is expected to live without disability. The utility and relevance of HLY for public health depends on a number of issues being resolved, including: maximising the panEuropean comparability of the measure of long-standing limitations; decomposition of the gaps in HLY by origin (mortality or disability), or by cause of morbidity and age group responsible; and the ability to assess the impact of changes in health determinants and health interventions on HLY. At a national and EU level, the utility of HLY depends on whether it can be computed by population sub-groups (i.e. socioeconomic groups) and by sub-national units
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