Substantial resources are devoted to reducing the incidence, duration and severity of major diseases that cause morbidity but not mortality 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) at birth 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.

Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health" by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury.

Age, Sex

Impact

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 . Predominant type of statistics: Predicted

Aggregation of HALE inputs for WHO Member States to regional and global level.

Years

Every 5 years

Every 5 years

Because these estimates draw on new data and on the results of the GBD 2010 study, and there have been substantial revisions to methods for many causes, and to the methods for dealing with comorbidity, these HALE estimates for the years 2000-2012 are not directly comparable with previous WHO estimates of HALE for earlier years.