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Welcome to the sixth ScotPHO e-Newsletter

New on the ScotPHO website

Click on the headlines below for more details

Scottish policies and strategies

This new resource provides a short index to Scottish Government policies and supporting information relevant to population health, and particularly to population health improvement. Its purpose is to provide a quick reference tool with links to relevant documents and web pages. Broad areas covered include:

• Social, economic and cultural context (health inequalities, socioeconomic inequalities, literacy);
• Health topics (alcohol, tobacco, drugs, food and healthy eating, mental health and wellbeing, oral health, physical activity, sexual health);
• Healthcare / conditions (cancer, heart disease and stroke, hepatitis C);
• Populations (early years, teenage transitions, communities, homeless, equality and diversity);
• Settings (healthy environments, workplace, local government, education).

Prisoners

Prisoners in Scotland are predominately young, male, white and come from the more deprived areas of Scotland. They have multi-layered and complex health needs and are often in prison for a very short time. This creates huge challenges for detection, assessment and delivery of integrated care, both within prison and in the transition between prison and the community. This new website section provides the policy background and summarises what we know about the profile of prisoners, and their risk factor behaviours and health.

Scotland and European Health for All (HfA) Database 2009

We published an update to this popular ScotPHO resource at the end of October 2009. The database is available as either an on-line or downloadable off-line version, along with a briefing paper and short notes offering interpretation of the key findings for Scotland. The database comprises Scottish data added to the WHO's European Health for All Database. Data are presented in a user-friendly, graphical or tabular form, allowing time trend and international comparisons for:

• 600 health and health-related indicators, with Scottish data available for 490 of these,
• 1970 to 2007 where available,
• Scotland and the 53 Member States of the WHO European Region, including the UK, plus averages such as the EU.

NHS Smoking Cessation Service Statistics (Scotland) 1st April 2008 to 31st March 2009

This short report presents information on quit attempts made with the help of NHS smoking cessation services, and 'self-reported' quits at one month after 'quit date', in Scotland, 1st April 2008 to 31st March 2009 (financial year). It provides supplementary information to the annual monitoring report (calendar year) published on the ScotPHO website on 26th May 2009. It also allows the HEAT 6 target to be monitored on a financial year basis.

CHP profiles 2008 - interactive Excel tool

In June 2008 we published Health and Wellbeing Profiles for 30 of the community health partnership (CHP) areas in Scotland, comprising 61 indicators of health and wider determinants of health. Profiles for the 10 CHP areas in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde were published separately by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.

We have now published an interactive Excel based tool that provides users with access to the full profiles data to allow further analysis. The tool includes a facility to generate spine graphs comprising all 61 profiles indicators for individual intermediate geography zones, as well as for CHPs and NHS boards. It also includes a facility to produce rank charts for each indicator comparing all intermediate geography zones within a CHP, all CHPs in Scotland or all NHS boards in Scotland.

ScotPHO are aware there is considerable interest in examining local variations in the profiles indicators. We believe this is best done with the benefit of knowledge of local factors that may affect indicator results and in conjunction with other local data sources.

We are now beginning work on the 2010 Community Health and Wellbeing Profiles to be published towards the end of this year. For further information on the 2010 profiles project, please email andrew.gasiorowski@nhs.net.

Dimensions of diversity: Population differences and health improvement opportunities

This report provides a concise overview of basic information about 13 characteristics or groups of the population of Scotland, linking users to sources of further information. It covers: age, asylum seekers and refugees, carers, disability, ethnicity, language, literacy, migrants, poverty, prisoners, religion and belief, sex and gender, and sexual orientation. There are some data for all population groups, but while much information is robust, much is unsatisfactory, being based on broad estimates, out of date or requiring generalisation to Scotland from the rest of the UK or beyond. The most important, recurring, theme for health improvement is the damage done to mental health and wellbeing by the pervasive and insidious effects of personal prejudice, collective discrimination and structural exclusion.

ScotPHO website topic focus

Healthy life expectancy

Whereas life expectancy (LE) is an estimate of how many years a person might be expected to live, healthy life expectancy (HLE) is an estimate of how many years they might live in ‘good’ health. LE and HLE at birth in Scotland have both improved over recent years. However, the gap between them (the years expected to be spent in ‘not good’ health during the average lifetime) has also tended to increase, particularly for males (see graph below).

LE and HLE are both worse in Scotland than in the UK as a whole; and Scotland has one of the lowest LEs in Western Europe. The website shows that HLE in Scotland varies markedly between males and females and among different geographical and deprivation groups.

Coming soon on the ScotPHO website

We hope to add the following resources to the ScotPHO website over the coming months, so please check our home page regularly to see what's new on the website.

Reports:

• HEPS: 12-year behaviour change trends.
• Maternal and infant nutrition epidemiological briefing.

Website sections:

• Chronic liver disease - to be published 23rd February 2010.

Other resources:

• Health inequalities intervention tool