Director of Public Health - Annual Report

The Isle of Man: An Equal Society?

The 2019 report is intended to show how variations in health and wellbeing are linked to differences in socio-economic status, discuss some of the indicators that have been developed elsewhere to measure inequalities and look at how actions to address them can be organised across government, the third and private sectors and communities.

We have an extraordinary opportunity as a small island nation to address inequalities through co-ordinated action through government policy and service delivery, and the contribution of those beyond Government. However, at present we simply do not know what inequalities there are across our population, whether our current policies and interventions are addressing and changing these, or whether we have gaps that we are not currently addressing at all.

Childhood Healthy Weight – The road to a better future

The 2018 Annual Report covers:

• an overview of overweight/obesity in children and young people
• what we know about factors that predispose to overweight/obesity
• the evidence for changes to the environment that are protective and the evidence for interventions to treat it.

By age five a quarter of the island’s children are overweight or obese, as are two thirds of adults. Obesity starts early in life and often related to family habits; therefore a focus on reducing childhood overweight is vitally important and makes it one of our greatest public health challenges.

The report recommends two broad areas for action:

1. transforming the environment to make healthy choices about food and physical activity the easy choices
2. encouraging and enabling people to live healthier lives.

Evidence shows that physical activity is one of the best things an individual can do to improve their health, whether overweight or not.

A key theme of the Programme for Government - helping people to live longer, healthier lives - is driving a range of initiatives to make physical activity a normal part of everyday life. Helping people live healthy and active lives will remain high on the public agenda to ensure future generations avoid long-term difficulties caused by obesity.

A Healthy Island? 

The 2017 Annual Report provides an independent overview of the health and wellbeing of the population of the Isle of Man. This is Dr Henriett Ewart's first report as Director and the first to be published since 2004.

Since 2015 the Public Health Directorate has been developing an Intelligence function to enable us to publish statistics that reflect the health of the population.

This data set was published in August 2019 and displays as the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF).