Healthy Life Years (HLY)

Eurostat data. The Healthy Life Years indicator (also called disability-free life expectancy) measures the number of remaining years that a person of a certain age can be expected to live without disability. Healthy Life Years is a solid indicator to monitor health as a productivity/economic factor. Healthy Life Years introduces the concept of quality of life. It is used to distinguish between years of life free of any activity limitation and years experienced with at least one activity limitation. The emphasis is not exclusively on the length of life, as is the case for life expectancy, but also on the quality of life.

Healthy Life Years (HLY) is a functional health status indicator that is increasingly used to complement conventional life expectancy indices. The HLY index was developed to reflect the fact that not all years of a person's life are typically lived in perfect health. Chronic disease, frailty and disability tend to become more prevalent at an older age, so a population with a higher life expectancy may not be healthier. Indeed, a major question with an aging population is whether increases in life expectancy will be associated with a greater or lesser proportion of the future population spending their years living with disability. If HLY is increase more rapidly than life expectancy in a population, then not only are people living longer, they are also living a greater portion of their lives free of disability.

Any loss of health will, nonetheless, have important secondary effects. These will include an altered pattern of resource allocation within the health-care system, as well as wider-ranging effects on consumption and production throughout the economy. It is important for policy-makers to be aware of the cost (i.e. the benefits foregone) of doing too little to prevent ill-health, resulting in the use of limited health-care resources for the diagnosis, treatment, and management of preventable illness and injuries