Healthy Life Expectancy
Healthy Life Expectancy – Scotland
The amount of time people spend in good health has been decreasing. Healthy life expectancy is the average number of years that an individual is expected to live in a state of self-assessed good or very good health, based on current mortality rates and prevalence of good or very good health. In Scotland this has fallen over the last decade.
Information on the Healthy Life Expectancy in Scotland was recently published by NRS (Healthy Life Expectancy, 2021-2023 – National Records of Scotland (NRS))). As shown in the figure below taken from this publication as age increases, LE and HLE both decrease. The difference in the proportion of life in good health between males and females narrows as age increases.
Healthy Life Expectancy – Grampian & Council Areas
For the period 2021-23, males could expect to live 61.6 years in good health and females 62.3 years. This compared favourably with the whole of Scotland (59.6 years and 60.0 years, respectively) but represented a decline compared to the period 2013-15.
Healthy life expectancy in Grampian declined by 3.3 years for males and 3.9 years for females between 2013-15 and 2021-23. This decline was greatest in Aberdeen City with females living 7.5 fewer years in good health (58.1 years compared to 65.7 years) and males 5.8 years fewer (58.0 years compared to 63.8 years).
This means that male healthy life expectancy in Aberdeen is now 1.6 years lower than the Scottish average. In 2013-15, male HLE in Aberdeen City was 1.9 years higher than the average for Scotland.
The proportion of life females spend in good health dropped by over nine percentage points in Aberdeen City between 2013-15 and 2021-23 (figure 14). This resulted in the proportion going from 3.4 percentage points above the Scottish average to 2.4 percentage points below. Smaller declines of 2-3 percentage points were recorded in Aberdeenshire and Moray.
For males, the percentage of life spent in good health dropped by 8 percentage points in Aberdeen City, between 2013-15 and 2021-23 resulting in the healthy proportion going from three percentage points above the Scotland wide figure to 1.8 percentage points below (figure 15). In Aberdeenshire and Moray 1-2 percentage point decreases were observed.
