Rationale

Substantial resources are devoted to reducing the incidence, duration and severity of major diseases that cause mortality and morbidity and to reducing their impact on people’s lives. It is important to capture both fatal and non-fatal health outcomes in a summary measure of average levels of population health. Healthy life expectancy (HALE) adds up expectation of life for different health states, adjusted for severity distribution making it sensitive to changes over time or differences between countries in the severity distribution of health states.

Definition

Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health", if he or she were to pass through the remaining years of life exposed to the sex- and age-specific mortality and morbidity prevailing at the time, for a specific year, in a given country, territory, or geographic area. At birth: taking into account years lived throughout the entire life course. At age 60: taking into account years lived at age 60 years and above.

Method of estimation

The equivalent lost healthy year fractions required for the HALE calculation are estimated as the all-cause years lost due to disability (YLD) rate per capita, adjusted for independent comorbidity, by age, sex and country. Sullivan's method uses the equivalent lost healthy year fraction (adjusted for comorbidity) at each age in the current population (for a given year) to divide the hypothetical years of life lived by a period life table cohort at different ages into years of equivalent full health and equivalent lost healthy years.