Rural deprivation and ill-health in England "in danger of being overlooked"

Rural communities are in danger of being overlooked when it comes to poverty, deprivation and ill-health, warns a new report from Public Health England.

In England 9.8m people – or 19% of the population – live in rural settings ranging from coastal villages to market towns to large, open expanses like the Yorkshire Dales.

But experts caution that while on average people in rural areas have better health than those in cities, the popular idea of affluent bucolic life is a misconception.

Instead, they say, official statistics have failed to capture the reality that many residents scattered across rural communities face deprivation, poverty and poor health.

“Within a rural community there are significant inequalities between parts that actually are very wealthy and parts that are quite deprived,” said Dr Rashmi Shukla,
Public Health England’s regional director for the Midlands and East of England and lead author of the report.

Published by the Local Government Association (LGA) and Public Health England, the research sheds light on a number of issues affecting the health and wellbeing of rural communities, including low-paid work, unemployment of young people, high costs of housing and fuel poverty.

Access to health services is also of concern, the authors note, with GPs, dentists and other services further away than in urban areas. Indeed, while 97% of urban households lie within 8km of a hospital, the figure for rural households is just 55%.

In addition, rural areas often lack of public transport, while poor broadband and mobile phone network availability hinders communication and access to online health services, banking, and shopping.

“Even people who may not be materially disadvantaged may have difficulties connecting and may be more socially isolated as a consequence of that,” said Shukla.

Social isolation, she adds, is a particular problem for older people – a sector of society that is larger in rural communities, with 23.5% of residents over the age of 65, compared to 16.3% in urban areas.

An ageing rural population, the authors point out, brings a number of challenges. These include the fact that older people often have poorer health and greater care needs, issues compounded by the greater distances to healthcare services and poor public transport. “Financial poverty in rural areas is also highly concentrated amongst older people, with around one-quarter of those in poverty in pensioner households,” the authors add.

Izzi Seccombe, chairman of the LGA’s Community Wellbeing board, said that many of the services that could help tackle these issues have been under pressure.

“What local authorities have all seen is a reduction in government grant,” she said. “While they have tried to protect the services for vulnerable people, like social care, some of our other services that we deliver – which can be subsidised transport, can be library services, it can be grants to the voluntary sector – those have been squeezed.”

The report encourages local authorities to take action to improve healthcare for rural areas, urging them to look closely at the particular challenges facing different communities. The authors also highlight successful initiatives including the “Fish Well” health improvement project in Norfolk, that offered quayside health checks, advice and support to fishermen that they would otherwise have found difficult to access.

The authors also highlight the need for official statistics that look more closely at conditions experienced by those living in the countryside, and at different areas within it, pointing out that current approaches don’t pick up small pockets of deprivation, and tend use measures that are more relevant in urban areas, such car ownership.

“A lot more digging needs to be done to understand the level of deprivation within rural communities,” said Shukla. “Just under 10m of our population live in these communities and a proportion of them are under severe hardship. We need to address that,” she added.

Seccombe agrees. “We must not forget our vulnerable people in more isolated communities,” she said.

Rural deprivation and ill-health in England "in danger of being overlooked"

Overlooked Benefit of Healthy Lifestyle Programs is ‘Improved Quality-of-Life’

A healthy lifestyle has more value than just the numbers on a scale or a blood pressure reading.  An often-overlooked benefit of a healthy lifestyle is measured through an improved “health-related quality-of-life.”

Scientists are able to show that people who participate in community-based behavioral lifestyle intervention programs to improve their health not only helped them lose weight, increased their physical activity levels, and reduced their risk of diabetes and heart disease — but these programs also increased their health-related quality of life.

Healthy Lifestyle Programs Improve Quality of Life

In the August issue of the journal Quality of Life Research, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health published an analysis that showed an important, overlooked benefit of community-based behavioral lifestyle intervention programs designed to improve health.

Researchers demonstrated that these programs could be measured through improved “health-related quality of life,” in addition to weight loss, increased physical activity, and reduced risk of diabetes and heart disease.

In a recent press release, lead author Yvonne L. Eaglehouse, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Pitt Public Health, briefly elaborated on the findings of this new research.

“These community-based lifestyle intervention programs have additional valuable benefits, beyond the improvement of risk factors for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.  Our study demonstrates that these programs, delivered in diverse community settings such as senior centers and work-sites, simultaneously and significantly improved the quality of life of the participants.”

Impact of the Group Lifestyle Balance Program

Dr. Eaglehouse and a team of researchers investigated the impact of the Group Lifestyle Balance program, modified from the lifestyle intervention program used in the highly successful U.S. Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP).

The Group Lifestyle Balance Program provides education, encouragement and the tools necessary to help people reach their healthy lifestyle goals. The program is designed for non–diabetic, overweight individuals age 18 and older who have pre–diabetes and/or the metabolic syndrome. These conditions are noted for increasing the risk for developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease — and the Group Lifestyle Balance program is designed for overweight adults who are at risk for developing diabetes.

Group Lifestyle Balance is a 22-session program, which is administered over a one-year period.  The primary aim of the program is to help people make lifestyle changes to improve their risk for diabetes and heart disease. The goals of the program are to help participants reduce their weight by at least seven percent and increase their moderate-intensity physical activity — like brisk walking — to 150 minutes per week.

A total of 223 participants were enrolled in this latest research to test the effectiveness of the Group Lifestyle Balance program at a work-site and three community centers in the Pittsburgh area. The participants averaged 58 years of age and had pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome, or both.

Before beginning the program, each participant ranked his or her current health on a scale from 0 “worst imaginable health state” to 100 “best imaginable health state.” The U.S. average is 79.2, whereas the participants averaged 71.5 at baseline.

Research Results

After completing the yearlong Group Lifestyle Balance program, the research participants increased their average health-related quality-of-life score to 78.2. When looking at only those with baseline health-related quality of life below the U.S. average, there was an even greater degree of improvement, from 61.8 at baseline, to 74 at the end of the program.

Senior author Andrea Kriska, Ph.D., professor in Pitt Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) study, shared in the excitement with respect to the health improvement for the research participants.

“It is exciting that we were able to document an improvement in health-related quality of life in addition to improvement in risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  This important benefit was most evident in those who started the intervention program having a relatively lower quality of life — in other words, those who needed to improve the most.”

Improved Lives for Millions

The University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, founded in 1948, is now one of the top-ranked schools of public health in the United States.  Scientists and researchers from the school conduct research on public health and medical care that improves the lives of millions of people around the world.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Public Health department is a leader in devising new methods to prevent and treat cardiovascular diseases, HIV/AIDS, cancer and other important public health problems.

This new research titled, “Impact of a community-based lifestyle intervention program on health-related quality of life,” is published in the August issue of the journal Quality of Life Research, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Overlooked Benefit of Healthy Lifestyle Programs is ‘Improved Quality-of-Life’

Teenage girls" mental health overlooked by parents, survey finds

Mother and father are worrying far more about drug and alcohol use by their teenage daughters than the a lot more prevalent “mental anguish” they face each day, a survey has advised.

Young girls stated mental well being, cyberbullying and jobs were the greatest worries in their lives, and an escalating amount considered self-harm and depression as the most considerable well being problems dealing with their peers, above drug or alcohol abuse.

Sarah Brennan, the chief executive of mental health charity YoungMinds, said the findings of Girlguiding’s Girls’ Frame of mind Survey 2015 had been a wake-up phone and highlighted the psychological anguish so many women encounter every day.

According to the survey, most women (58%) aged 13 to 21 believed psychological overall health was a severe concern, a lot more than a third (37%) said they have been anxious about cyberbullying, and 36% explained they fretted about not currently being ready to get a work.

But teenage ladies felt misunderstood by grownups, saying their mothers and fathers worried a lot more about drug and alcohol use than psychological illness.

Two out of 5 of the ladies (42%) said their mothers and fathers have been concerned about drug use, 33% about alcohol, and 29% about smoking, although people aged 16 to 21 believed unplanned teenage pregnancy (42%) and risky or unprotected sex (34%) were the best source of fret.

Katherine Bradfield, 18, from Belfast, who is about to begin her research at Leeds University, believes the pressures on youthful individuals are modifying.

She explained: “I absolutely feel that for people my age the pressures and the difficulties they are dealing with are changing from what you may possibly traditionally think – items like peer stress and medicines and alcohol, which are certainly nevertheless really massive difficulties.

“But I consider much less talked about difficulties like psychological wellness, sexual harassment and consuming problems are turning out to be a great deal a lot more prevalent at the minute, and I consider ladies are really beginning to pick up on that, and it’s turning out to be a bit more nicely-talked about.”

The survey located self-harming was the greatest health concern for girls.

3-quarters (75%) of those aged 11 to 21 explained it was a serious overall health issue for individuals their age, up from 62% in 2010, and 72% stated smoking was, down from 82% 5 years in the past.

Concern for mental illness and depression has risen significantly amongst teenagers. In 2010, just above half (56%) considered it a severe overall health dilemma amid their peers, in contrast to 69% who did this yr.

While four out of five girls (82%) aged eleven to 21 mentioned grownups do not recognise the stress they are beneath, 62% knew a woman their age who had skilled a mental overall health issue, according to the survey.

But, regardless of the increasing concern reported, over half of girls (57%) stated they felt awkward talking about mental health, growing to 66% amongst individuals aged 17 to 21.

Julie Bentley, chief executive of Girlguiding, which runs a peer education programme to inspire women to talk about their problems, explained: “The findings in the year’s Girls’ Attitudes Survey give a stark warning about the fragile state of British girls’ well becoming.

“We require the help of decision makers to start an open conversation about girls’ concerns. By listening to women, we can work together to tackle the root brings about of their distress – and champion their potential.”

Brennan, of YoungMinds, joined calls for higher mental overall health assistance for young girls, saying: “Parents and carers must also be offered the expertise, equipment and info to aid kids as they journey by way of the emotional turmoil that goes with becoming a younger grownup, and spotting the indicators if they are struggling.”

Teenage girls" mental health overlooked by parents, survey finds