Summary of Conclusions and Recommendations

Summary of Conclusions

1. The majority of local authorities are not addressing men’s health. Only 27 out of 147 (18%) had a majority of their measures in their JSNA local and gendered, that is broken down to show figures for men and for women in their area.

2. Worryingly, areas with poor male life expectancy are not necessarily prioritising men’s health, despite the numbers of men in their area who are dying young.

3. Local authorities are failing to recognise the importance of men’s mental health. Mental illness and mental health diagnosis rates were included by gender in just a handful of JSNAs yet 78% of people who take their own lives are male.

4.Key lifestyle areas are regularly being overlooked. Only alcohol is included as a gendered measure in the majority of the JSNAs. Too often diet, smoking and sexual health are neglected.

5. Figures on disease prevalence and related hospital admissions which affect men considerably more, such as cancer and coronary heart disease are not gendered leaving key gaps in the understanding of survival and the burden of disease.

Social gradient in men's life expectancy

Main Recommendations

Local authorities and Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) should implement change by ensuring that available gender-disaggregated data is used in their JSNAs. This will allow Health and Wellbeing Boards to fully address gender-specific health inequalities.
NHS England and Public Health England (PHE) should support areas with low male life expectancies and provide extra support to ensure better health analysis.
Local authorities should invest in research to better understand male lifestyle behaviour and men’s mental health in their areas.
NHS England and PHE should make it a requirement for local authorities to use gendered data and make that data more easily accessible. They should also create a template JSNA for local authorities to follow. This will improve the quality of JSNAs and allow comparison between areas.
Use the examples of good practice to improve JSNAs. The Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council JSNA contained 26 gendered measures. In the absence of any national templates, the council devised and conducted its own health and wellbeing survey to focus on prevention in male health.

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.