Chris Ruane – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chris Ruane on 2014-06-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what use his Department has made of the National Wellbeing Index introduced by the Office for National Statistics in formulating policy since the introduction of that Index in 2011; and what policies his Department has introduced to improve national wellbeing as defined in that Index since 2010.

Norman Lamb

The Department has worked closely with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on the development of the Measuring National Wellbeing Framework. Given the experimental nature of the data it is too early to use it specifically to formulate policy. However, some examples of relevant work taken forward by the Department include:

– working in partnership with ONS to include a measure of mental wellbeing into the Measuring National Wellbeing Framework;

– including wellbeing questions on a range of health surveys, for example the Health Survey for England, Health Behaviours of School-aged Children, the trial of a local level survey of 15 year olds, and the current wave of the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey;

– including wellbeing as a key indicator in the Public Health Outcomes Framework;

– publishing a narrative and a series of factsheets on why wellbeing matters to health policy;

– publishing a report on the predictors of wellbeing across the lifecourse;

– conducting two wellbeing workshops with policy makers to allow them to consider their policies from a wellbeing perspective; and

– co-founding a collaborative studentship with the University of Warwick on positive genetics using twin data to explore how genetics are related to wellbeing.

Wellbeing will also be considered in the forthcoming Chief Medical Officer’s annual report.