Introduction
This page contains data on health inequalities at England and local level.
CHIME, the Health Inequalities Dashboard and the Segment Tool are interactive web tools which can be accessed via the links below. Some additional data and resources are also provided on this page.
COVID-19 Health Inequalities Monitoring for England tool (CHIME)
The CHIME tool brings together data relating to the impacts of COVID-19, for factors such as mortality rates, hospital admissions, confirmed cases, vaccinations and life expectancy. It presents inequality breakdowns, including by age, sex, ethnic group, level of deprivation, population density and region.
Access the CHIME tool here
Health Inequalities Dashboard
The Health Inequalities Dashboard provides information to monitor progress on reducing inequalities within England. It presents measures of inequality for 19 key indicators, the majority drawn from the Public Health Outcomes Framework. The dashboard measures trends in each indicator since a baseline period, with longer term data provided where these are available.
Access the Health Inequalities Dashboard here
Segment Tool
The Segment Tool provides information on the causes of death and age groups that are driving inequalities in life expectancy at local area level. Targeting the causes of death and age groups which contribute most to the life expectancy gap should have the biggest impact on reducing inequalities.
A flyer introducing the Segment Tool can be found here.
Access the Segment Tool here
Additional resources
To provide further understanding of local authority trends in life expectancy, an Excel file comparing current estimates with a range of earlier time periods has been produced. This file also highlights that current life expectancy in some areas is still lower than the average life expectancy in England 10, 15 and 20 years ago, and can be downloaded here.
To provide further understanding of geographic inequalities in life expectancy, and some of the other indicators in the Health Inequalities Dashboard, a set of maps has also been produced. The PowerPoint file can be downloaded here.
Recent updates
March 2023
The Health Inequalities Dashboard was updated in March 2023. The following changes were made:
- Ten indicators have been updated in the tool
- A new indicator on prevalence of adult obesity has been added
- Four indicators (prevalence of obesity in reception and year 6 children, low birth weight of term babies, and dental decay) have been updated to use the logit slope index of inequality as the summary measure of inequality. More information on this can be found in the guidance
- The indicator of tuberculosis incidence has been removed
- Changes have been made to the layout of the tool to make it easier to use and more consistent with other OHID tools
January 2023
The Segment Tool was updated in January 2023. The following changes were made to the tool:
- Data for NHS regions and NHS Integrated Care Boards were added
- Existing data have been refreshed. Final 2021 deaths data replaces provisional data used in the previous release. Deaths have been re-allocated to areas based on the May 2022 postcode lookup file, replacing the May 2021 postcode lookup file used in the previous release
December 2022
The CHIME tool was updated in December 2022. The following changes were made to the tool:
- Existing indicators for deaths, hospital admissions and vaccinations were updated
- Data on inequalities in vaccination uptake within lower tier local authorities were added to the tool for the first time
November 2022
The Segment Tool was updated in November 2022. The following changes were made to the tool:
- Data for 2014 to 2016, and 2017 to 2019 have been added to the tool, in addition to the 2020 to 2021 data which were already available
- The user interface of the tool has been redesigned to allow trends to be viewed
Data for lower tier local authorities have been included for 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2019, but have not been included for 2020 to 2021 as the breakdowns based on two years of data are not robust due to small numbers.
June 2022
The Health Inequalities Dashboard was updated in June 2022. The following changes were made:
- Data was updated for 8 of the 19 indicators
- Indicators of premature mortality from cardiovascular diseases and cancer have moved from being presented as three year rolling rates to annual rates so that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic can be more clearly seen.
- Three mortality indicators now use the log Slope Index of Inequality (SII) method to measure inequality. More information can be found in the guidance and FAQs
- Premature mortality rate from cardiovascular diseases
- Premature mortality rate from cancer
- Suicide rate
- Some changes have been made to the user interface of the tool to make the charts more accessible
May 2022
The Segment Tool was updated in May 2022. The following changes were made to the tool:
- Provisional data were added for 2020 to 2021 (two years aggregated)
- The user interface of the tool has been redesigned to make data more easily accessible and the charts more interactive
- COVID-19 has been added to the cause breakdowns
Provisional data for 2020 to 2021 have been added to allow users to view the breakdown of inequality in life expectancy during the COVID-19 pandemic. These data are based on provisional mortality data for 2021, and 2020 population estimates. The tool will be updated once final data becomes available.
Data for lower tier local authorities have not been included as the breakdowns based on two years of data are not robust due to small numbers.
Data for NHS geographies are not included but it is anticipated that, where possible, these will be added in a future update.
Previous data has been removed from the tool as it is not comparable with the latest data.
April 2022
A link to the COVID-19 Health Inequalities Monitoring for England tool (CHIME) has been added to this page. The tool is updated on a monthly basis.
March 2021
The Health Inequalities Dashboard was updated in March 2021. The following changes were made:
- Data was updated for 11 of the 19 indicators
- Supplementary charts have been added for the Slope Index of Inequality measure for life expectancy at birth
- Smoking prevalence in adults now contains a breakdown by sex for all geographies, with inequality measures also available by sex at England level for the majority of the inequality dimensions
- The indicator of children in low income families (all dependent children under 20) has been replaced with two new indicators: children in absolute low income families and children in relative low income families. Both are based on children under 16 and further details can be found in the definitions tab
September 2020
The Health Inequalities Dashboard was updated in September 2020. The following changes were made:
- Data was updated for 8 of the 18 indicators
- The child excess weight indicator definition changed from prevalence of overweight and obese to prevalence of obesity and severely obese. Regional inequality measures were added
- Additional inequality groups were added to the smoking indicator including ethnic group, religion and country of birth
- The definitions tab was moved to sit within the data tab
March 2020
The Health Inequalities Dashboard was updated in March 2020. The following changes were made:
- Data was updated for 10 of the 18 indicators
- An absolute measure of inequality was added to the tool for premature cardiovascular disease mortality, infant mortality and alcohol related hospital admissions
- Data at Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) level was added showing inequality in smoking prevalence
- Developments to the user interface to improve ease of use
- Improvement to guidance and metadata
- The URL to access the tool has been changed
An additional resources section was also added to the page in March containing further information on inequalities in life expectancy and other indicators.
January 2020
The Segment Tool was updated in January 2020. The following changes were made to the tool:
- Data for NHS geographies for the period 2015-17 were added. This includes data for NHS regions, NHS region local offices, Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STP), and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG)
- An option to download an Excel file containing all data from the tool was added to the Breakdowns page
- The URL to access the tool has been changed
May 2019
This page was created in May 2019 to host the Health Inequalities Dashboard and Segment Tool. Both tools were updated at the same time.
The following changes have been made to the Health Inequalities Dashboard since the previous update in September 2018:
- The tool has been renamed ‘Health Inequalities Dashboard’
- The grouping of the indicators into domains has been revised for consistency with the Public Health Outcomes Framework
- All of the 18 indicators have been updated with latest inequality data at England level
- Region and local authority level data have been added for 17 of the 18 indicators (all indicators except proportion of 5 year old children with dental decay)
- Inequality data at region and local authority level have been added for 4 of the 18 indicators. It is planned that more local level inequality data will be added to the tool over time
The following changes have been made to the Segment Tool since the previous update in May 2016:
- The tool has been redeveloped as an interactive web tool (using R shiny software), replacing the previous Excel based tool and pdf reports
- Data has been updated to 2015-17
- The methodology used to calculate the contributions of causes of death to life expectancy gaps has been revised for consistency with analysis presented in the Health Profile for England inequalities chapter
- The detailed cause of death groups have been revised for consistency with the Health Profile for England analysis
- The contribution of specific age groups to life expectancy gaps have been added
The methodology changes mean that the latest version of the Segment Tool is not comparable with previous versions of the tool, so older versions have been removed from the website.
