Understanding Healthy Life Expectancy

What is Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE)?

Healthy Life Expectancy (HALEs) is the average number of years that a newborn can expect to live in "full health." Healthy Life Expectancy is a calculation used by statisticians and demographers to adjust life expectancy for the amount of time spent in poor health. The World Health Organization (WHO) calculates HALEs (pronounced haleys) for each country in the world.

How is it Calculated?

This is a bit complicate. The WHO takes a country's data like mortality rates and health status information and crunches them. The calculation looks at the mortality rate for different health conditions and adjusts it for the duration or severity of the illnesses.

Why Use HALES?

HALEs try to measure a health system's effectiveness in reducing the burden of illness. Sometimes, an illness can be shortened or the suffering reduced, but the mortality rate doesn’t change. HALEs were established to assess a health system ability to reduce suffering even if the mortality rate remained unchanged.

Show Me Some HALEs

The numbers below are HALEs for different countries. Remember that these figures represent an estimate of the number of years a newborn today will live in full health in each of the countries. I’ve also included the total life expectancy for each country so you can see the differences:

_Sources:

WHO Statistical Query.