Professor David Gordon
speaker
17 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2015
last heard Mar 2015
Professor David Gordon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The healthy life expectancy is how long people will live before they're likely to become disabled or have a chronic disease.
And of course, the way this is measured will vary from country to country.
In the UK, we know how many people are born, how many people die, when they die, and more or less what they died of.
In poor countries like Rwanda, unfortunately, they don't have such comprehensive information.
So there's no developing country which has a comprehensive register of the causes of child death, for example.
Many children become sick and die, and they're never recorded on any official documents.
And therefore, in order to measure healthy life expectancy in a country like Rwanda, where all the necessary data aren't available, a number of assumptions have to be made and what's called life tables are applied.
And of course, depending on the assumptions you make, you can get somewhat different results.
It's also getting an estimate from the population of how many people are sick and disabled.
And that uses a series of three questions in the European Union, which have been harmonised across all 28 European countries.
The main difference in the number of people who consider they have a limiting disease or disability is between richer and poorer countries.
What we find is in the richer countries, there are more people who regard themselves as disabled than there are in the poorer countries.
This in part is because the population of the richer countries tends to be older.
But it's also because people tend not to define themselves as disabled or having a limiting illness unless they feel they can get some help for it.
The more help that's available for people, the more people are willing to define themselves as disabled.
There's great inequality in the UK in terms of health and wealth, and unfortunately it's growing.
And in the worst parts of the UK, people die younger than they do in the richer parts of poor developing countries.
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