Department of Health

Website of the Department of Health

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Health survey background

Each year the Health Survey for England focuses on a different demographic group and looks at such health indicators as cardio-vascular disease, physical activity, eating habits, oral health, accidents, and asthma. Since 1994 onwards the survey has been carried out by the Joint Survey Unit of the National Centre of Social Research and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.

Health Survey for England - Introduction

The Health Survey for England is a series of annual surveys about the health of people in England. The Health Survey was first proposed in 1990 to improve information of morbidity by the (then) newly created Central Health Monitoring Unit within the Department of Health . This information is used to underpin and improve targeting of nationwide health policies.

Health survey programme

Please note that this information is now collected and published by the Information Centre for health and social care (IC). All data published from October 2005 onwards will be published on the IC website.

Health authority data

By combining several years on survey data it is possible to provide information on core topics at health authority level. This was first done combining years 1994 - 1996 Further information at HA level is planned combing data from 1998-2001 and 2004-2006, so that data is available at five year intervals.

Archived dataset

The full (anonymised) datasets for the Health Survey are available through the Data Archive at Essex University which is the largest national resource of computer readable copies of social science and humanities data in the United Kingdom. Further information can be obtained from: The Data Archive, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ. Telephone 01206 872001. Fax 01206 872003. E-mail: archive@essex.ac.uk; Mailbase: essex-archive-all@mailbase.ac.uk.

Question Bank

The full set of questions for the Health Survey for England are held on the Question Bank website. The Question Bank is an information resource (funded by the ESRC) in the field of social research, with a particular emphasis on quantitative survey methods, held in the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey.

Enquiries

Please contact the Information Centre for health and social care. General enquiries to include freedom of information and data protection requests should be directed to the contact centre on 0845 300 6016, which is available from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.

Additional links

Ordering publications

Contact details for obtaining hard-copy DH publications.

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