Health and place - How levelling up health can keep older workers working

The Health of Older People in Places (HOPE) project is a multidisciplinary research project funded by the Health Foundation under the Social and Economic Value of Health in a Place (SEVHP) programme.c The research team includes scientists from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London (UCL) and the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. [...] The HOPE project has built on this research by showing the link between levels of employment and health in a place.d It finds that: • The higher the proportion of older people with poor health in a place, the less likely it is that any adults in that place will be in paid work. [...] • There’s a correlation between health in a place and younger people being in paid employment: for example, the probability of a woman aged 16 to 49 not being in paid work was 33.7% in the ‘unhealthiest’ areas compared with 26.3% in the ‘healthiest’ areas. [...] In the unhealthiest areas of England and Wales, all residents aged 16 to 74 were 1.6 times more likely to be out of work than those living in the healthiest areas.6 The association between health in a place and employment was slightly stronger for men of this age than for women.7 In research that compared data from the ‘healthiest’ tertile of local authorities in England and Wales to the ‘unhealth. [...] The HOPE project also links health in a place to labour market participation for those aged 50 to 74 and highlights the issue that in the ‘unhealthiest’ parts of the UK, older workers are significantly more likely to leave paid employment earlier than in the ‘healthiest’ parts.   The HOPE research projections show that achieving the Government’s goal of reducing the HLE gap will mean that older wo.