Our health and wellbeing is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including environmental and societal factors, or determinants of health. ‘Environmental’ factors refer to how our physical surroundings impact on our health, and can include, for instance, things like air pollution, safe neighbourhoods, and our living and working conditions. ‘Societal’ factors may include, for example, community support systems, welfare systems, education, job opportunities and income.

Individual lifestyle choices also impact on our health, with personal behaviours such as smoking, physical activity, alcohol or drug consumption, and diet promoting or harming health. Certain behaviours undoubtedly pose greater health risks than others, but social and economic conditions can also make it harder for us to change these behaviours, and may even reinforce the unhealthy ones. As such, it is unrealistic to give simple cause-and-effect explanations of health as it involves the interaction of so many different factors. What is clear, however, is that health inequalities exist, linked to a person’s (or community’s) social and economic status – the Marmot review, gives lots of great information on this. It would seem that the current ‘cost-of-living’ crisis is exacerbating this issue.

A great tool to discover the health determinants and inequalities in your area are the ‘local authority health profiles’ from the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (formerly Public Health England). These health profiles are designed to help local government and health services make decisions and plans to improve local people’s health and reduce health inequalities. They present a set of important health indicators, giving an overview of health for a particular area and showing how that area compares to the national and regional average. Reading the summaries may add to your appreciation of the key factors affecting the health of your local population and local health priorities.

Find the Health Profile for your area here.