Driving Force: Increacing Healthy Life Expectancy

Description:

'The tension between ‘living longer’ on the one hand and the ‘quality of life’ on the other has become a central health policy problem. The introduction of the indicator ‘health expectancy’ (HE), a measurement that combines mortality data with morbidity and disability data, was a logical reaction to these changes and to the growing need for a present-day yardstick to estimate this problem.'[3]

Life expectancy is the average number of years remaining for a living being (or the average for a class of living beings) of a given age to live. Life expectancy is also called average life span or mean life span, in distinction to maximum life span.

Healthy life expentancy is the amount of years people in a certain (WHO member) country spend in a 'healthy fashion'. According to [2], years of healthy life lost due to disability represent 18% of total life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa, and decreases to around 8% in the countries with the highest healthy life expectancies, a list lead by Japan, followed by Australia and France.

Enablers:

- Growing focus on living a healthy life
- Growing understanding of what constitutes health
- Growing understanding of how to deal with disease


Relevant existing driving forces;
Medicine

Inhibitors:

- Opens possibilities regarding focussed marketing

Relevant existing driving forces;
People's need for communication and information

Paradigms:

"Globally, the male-female gap is lower for [healthy life expentancy] than for total life expectancy. Healthy life expectancy increases across countries at a faster rate than total life expectancy, suggesting that reductions in mortality are accompanied by reductions in disability. Although women live longer, they spend a greater amount of time with disability. As average levels of health expenditure per capita increase, healthy life expectancy increases at a greater rate than total life expectancy."[2]

As people get older, their needs change rapidly. In 1960, people worked longer than not. On average in 2006, retirement lasts 10 years longer than the average time spend working. Besides the heavy strains on pensionfunds and the healthcare system in general, this offers oppurtunities for a wide variety of businesses.

Experts:

L. A. Gavrilov
N. S. Gavrilova
C. D. Mathers PhD
R. Sadana DS
J. A. Salomon AB
C. J. L. Murray MD
A. D. Lopez PhD

Resources:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
2. 'Healthy Life Expectancy in 191 countries', 1999 - Colin D Mathers et al (World Health Report 2000) 3. 'Policy relevance of the health expectancy indicator; an inventory in European Union countries', Harry P. A. van de Water , Rom J. M. Perenboom and Hendriek C. Boshuizen