Director of Public Health - Annual Report

Annual Report 2018

Childhood Healthy Weight – The road to a better future

Childhood Healthy Weight – 2018 Annual Report

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.  

Feedback

You also have an opportunity to complete our short questionnaire about this year's annual report. Your comments and feedback will help us to make decisions about improvements for future reports.

Annual Report 2017

A Healthy Island? – Annual report 2017

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 will be published in the near future and displays as the Public Health Outcomes Dataset (PHOD). 

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