Preventing early death and increasing years of healthy life

Chapters

Our JSNA chapters consider the current and future health and social care needs of specific topics.

You can download the following topic-specific chapters as accessible Word documents:

Resources

Here are some useful links for further information and data related to preventing early death and increasing years of healthy life. These resources are from external organisations, such as the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and the NHS Benchmarking Network.

  • Cancer services profile: includes data on cancer incidence and screening, diagnostic services, Two-Week Wait (TWW) referrals, emergency presentations and admissions
  • Cardiovascular disease profile: presents an overview of data on cardiovascular and cardiovascular related conditions of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease
  • INHALE: the INteractive Health Atlas of Lung conditions in England is an online tool showing data from a range of sources about respiratory diseases including COPD and asthma
  • Mortality profile: brings together mortality indicators from five topics: 1) premature mortality; 2) leading causes of death; 3) preventable mortality; 4) COVID-19 mortality; and 5) other mortality
  • CVDPREVENT: the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Audit (CVDPREVENT) is a national audit of GP records to support primary care in understanding how many people with CVD, or conditions that lead to a higher risk of developing CVD, are potentially undiagnosed, under treated or over treated
  • Suicide prevention profile: presents a range of publically available data on suicide, associated prevalence, risk factors, and service contact among groups at increased risk.

Context

About 2,300 Medway residents die each year and around a third of these deaths are premature (aged under 75 years). Therefore, it is important to continuously improve healthcare to not only improve quality of life, but to prevent early death too.

The leading causes of illness and early death in Medway include:

  • cancer
  • circulatory disease (for example, heart attack, stroke and heart failure)
  • respiratory disease.

These conditions share many common risk factors, such as smoking and obesity.

Over recent decades, improved health care and public health measures, such as reductions in smoking, have led to a dramatic decrease in the number of deaths from the leading causes. Early diagnosis is also important to improve outcomes in some diseases by providing care at the earliest possible stage.

Most people with long-term health conditions have a single condition that can be managed at relatively low cost. However, as people age, they are more likely to experience several conditions at the same time. As the number and severity of these conditions increases, the complexity and cost of managing them becomes much greater. Addressing these conditions requires well-integrated health and social care system.