§ Lord WarnerMy honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health has today made the following Written Ministerial Statement.
The public health White Paper, Choosing Health: Making Healthy Choices Easier, set out the importance of ensuring that as the country strives to improve its health a priority must be given to tackling health inequalities so that all groups in society benefit from improvements in public health.
The Government have set public service agreement targets to address geographical inequalities in life expectancy, cancer, heart disease, stroke and related diseases. The targets aim to see faster progress compared to the average in the "fifth of areas with the worst health and deprivation indicators". Achievement of the targets will be assessed on the outcomes for this group in 2010. The local authorities and primary care trusts which are in these areas, the so-called Spearhead Group, has been published.
The Spearhead Group is made up of 70 local authorities and 88 primary care trusts, based upon the local authority areas that are in the bottom fifth nationally for three or more of the following five factors:
- Male life expectancy at birth;
- female life expectancy at birth;
- cancer mortality rate in under 75s;
- cardiovascular disease mortality rate in under 75s;
- Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 (local authority summary), average score.
The list of local authorities and primary care trusts in the Spearhead Group is available in the Library.
For more information on health inequalities and on the Spearhead Group, visit http://www.dh.gov.uk/healthinequalities.