End the Lung Health Lottery – the data behind the campaign
You might have seen that we have recently run a campaign to End the Lung Health Lottery. We looked into how lung conditions affect people differently across the UK, and found big differences in outcomes for respiratory conditions in different parts of the country. For example, people in Blackpool experience death rates from lung conditions over two times higher than more affluent areas, such as the London Borough of Richmond. Here, Andrew from our data + Insights team tells us how we did it, what we want to see, and how you can explore the data we used in the campaign yourself.
How we got our data
We wanted to know how lung conditions affect people in different parts of the country. Our previous work has shown disparities in asthma care, COPD care and the impact of air pollution, and we wanted to find out how using more than one dataset would show where the differences were.
For this work, we looked at two very important indicators – emergency hospital admissions and death rates. We looked at data for all lung conditions, and across all four nations of the UK. We used age-standardised rates per 100,000 population. This allows fair comparisons across areas with different populations and different age structures in their populations. We used data from 2020-21, as this was the most recently available data for all indicators. And finally, we used local authority (in England, Upper Tier and Unitary level) areas to compare geographic areas.
We ranked the rates for both indicators used, and took the average of those ranks to get our overall figure.
Stark inequalities across the UK
Simply put, our analysis shows that there are places in the UK where you are more likely to go to hospital or die from a lung condition than in other places. We found that the five areas in the UK that had the highest rates of emergency admissions and mortality were Knowsley, Inverclyde, Salford, North Ayrshire and Blackburn with Darwen. On the other hand, the places with the lowest rates for these indicators were York, Bracknell Forest, Barnet, Kensington and Chelsea and West Sussex. These areas are highlighted in the map below – the highest rates being the areas in red, and the lowest rates the areas in green.
Many of the areas ranking poorly in the data are areas with higher levels of deprivation, which can mean a higher chance of exposure to factors that put people with lung conditions at risk. Smoking rates are generally higher in these areas, and people on lower incomes are more likely to have to live in poor quality housing which can trigger lung conditions. Air pollution levels are also a factor. Levels of PM 2.5, the most dangerous type of air pollution to human health, in Blackpool (ranking at number 210) are four times higher than levels in the Shetland Islands in Scotland, which has one of the lowest emergency admission and death rates (ranking at number 13). It’s a complex problem without simple solutions.
Calling for urgent action
We don’t think this is fair. Where you live should not affect your chances of going to hospital or dying from a lung condition. The government needs to urgently address inequalities in lung health outcomes. We want to see the following action taken to start to address this issue:
tackling the underlying causes of lung disease like smoking and high levels of air pollution
ensuring early and accurate diagnosis, so people with lung conditions can get the treatment they need
increasing research spend – currently, respiratory health only gets 2% of money spent on medical research.
Find out more
If you are interested in this issue, we have a number of resources for you to find out more.
You can sign our petition to End the Lung Health Lottery here
You can explore the data yourself by downloading it here
You can see the data on a map by exploring our data visualisation here
If you are interested in the data, you can email us at data@asthmaandlung.org.uk