The Social and Economic Value of Health

Economic and social factors have a complex, dynamic and multi-directional relationship with people’s health. While much is known about their impact on people’s health, relatively little is understood about the impact of individuals’ health on the economy and society.

Aims

This Health Foundation programme aims to generate new knowledge and expand our understanding of the impact that a person’s physical and/or mental health has on their own economic and social outcomes over the medium to long term.

The programme will help develop understanding of the economic and social case for investing in strategies that maintain, protect and create health more broadly than through investment in health care, by reframing health as an asset that can potentially deliver wider economic and social returns on investment.

Projects

We are funding six projects with between £150,000 and £350,000. They will each run for up to three years.

The projects span a range of age groups and different social and economic outcomes. They will look at areas such as whether health status changes across the life course; whether similar experiences of health result in different outcomes across generations; and how variations in people’s mental and physical health shape their social and economic outcomes.

Key areas of interest for the projects include:

• the impact of a person’s health on the economic and social aspects of their life, both at specific points in time and over the course of their lives
• understanding how individuals’ different experiences of health leads to varying economic and social outcomes in the future
• comparing across generations to find out whether similar experiences of health result in different outcomes, reflecting a changing context
• methods that test explicitly whether health affects economic and social outcomes, rather than economic and social factors affecting health.