Health: The role of public data in taking the pulse of a nation.

Miles is joined by colleagues from the Health and Life Events team to explore how data is good for our health.

Within the diagnosis: the Health Index, dubbed “the GDP of health”; the impacts of Covid-19 as well as an ageing society; and the increasing importance of linking data from numerous sources to generate complex insights that inform decision-making.

TRANSCRIPT

MILES FLETCHER

Welcome again to Statistically Speaking the Office for National Statistics podcast. This time we're taking the pulse of the nation's health and exploring the role of public data in making it better. Of course, we would say that statistics are good for you. We recommend at least five a day, but more seriously, what do the ONS figures say about the state of our health now? And what are we doing to create new and better statistical insights to support a healthier population in future?

With us to examine all are ONS colleagues, Julie Stanborough, Deputy Director of Health and Life Events, Neil Bannister, Assistant Deputy Director of Health Analysis and, later in the podcast, Jonny Tinsley, Head of Health and Life Events Data Transformation.

Julie to start with you. The World Health Organisation defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Now, the ONS has begun a major project that seeks to capture the key elements of that in one place and to a certain extent in one single number. Can explain what that is, and what it's all about? JULIE STANBOROUGH Yes, so that will be the Health Index, and as you say, it is kind of regarded as the GDP of health. And at its simplest, it allows the health of England and local authorities to be tracked over time, which allows greater understanding of the relationships between the drivers of health and health outcomes. So the index starts in England in 2015. And we've got data up to 2019, which is available online, but we're going to be publishing 2020 figures very shortly. MF So tell us about the nuts and bolts, what are the data sources here and how have they been put together? JS We've got a huge number of different data sources that go into the Health Index. We've grouped them into three different themes, that we have healthy people, healthy lives and healthy places. And we use data sources from within ONS, but also from across government, and more broadly, to give that really in-depth breadth of all the data that goes into health. MF What sort of factors, what sort of elements are we looking at? People living without serious health conditions? JS Yeah, so it's a whole range of things. For example, looking at child poverty through to access to green spaces, life expectancy, a whole range of different factors which contribute to whether a particular area is deemed to have high health index or a low health index. MF Is there particular value - because you can understand wanting to understand disparities at local level and we'll talk about that a bit a bit later - but boiling it down to a single reading, a GDP. That's a very ambitious thing. How useful, how relevant, is that figure going to be? Is it something that the future will look to us regularly and take as seriously as a big number like GDP? JS I'd really hope so. And I think because the complexity of health is so complex, if we can boil it down to one number and be able to track that over time, at a national level, or at a local level, that really helps people understand what's going on and helps them to engage, but equally because it has all the different data sources in there, it allows those policy makers in local authorities to be able to go into that data and explore what really is happening in their particular area. MF More than simply measuring the outputs or successes of the health services, it's about understanding a much wider range of factors as well as the environment in which people live and their socio-economic position as well. JS That's right. I mean, there are so many different aspects to it. And that's why the Health Index has so many different data sources in there. But because of that complexity, it makes it really difficult for people to understand what they should be doing to improve the health in their areas. So you need that breadth, but then the ability to aggregate it up into a single number helps with the accessibility. MF So the index will provide this big reading of this multi factor estimate of health but perhaps it'll be the case that it isn't so much what the index says at any given time, but how it changes over time, that'll be its real value. JS That's right. And it's being able to track that at a national level. And at a local level. We're going to be publishing 2020 results, but we're going to have to be quite careful with those results because it'd be the first year with the pandemic and so we'd expect to be seeing some changes as a result of the pandemic. But equally, som...