The Health Poverty Index (HPI), is a web based tool that allows geographical areas and different ethnic groups to be compared in terms of their health poverty.

A group's health poverty is a summary measure of both their present state of health and future health potential or lack of it. The latest update of the HPI was released in conjunction with a new HPI work book (pdf 1.6Mb), which guides the user through some of the features of the tool and demonstrates how the Index can be used to provide a single visual summary of an area's health poverty.

The HPI draws on more than 60 indicators of health and its wider determinants and presents these in a spider graph a bar chart and in tables. This gives a strong visual overview of health poverty allowing broad trends, distinctive patterns and important associations to be identified.

The HPI was developed to underpin work on reducing inequalities by informing policy development, service planning and resource allocation. Rather than being a tool for monitoring inequalities and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions, the HPI has been developed to provide an essential summary at the start of decision-making processes (e.g. in assessing needs, discussing local priorities).

As such, it complements other available products like the Local Basket of Inequalities Indicators (see below). The HPI website also has a new look and the HPI Tool page has been redesigned to make it more user-friendly.

If you haven't taken a look at the HPI website recently, you might like to visit it to see the changes for yourself. Access The Health Poverty Index.

The Local Basket of Health Inequalities Indicators, which is a collection of over 60 indicators measuring health and factors which influence health inequalities, now has a new data retrieval tool which makes it easier to locate, search and extract the indicators. This tool, which also allows comparisons to be made more readily with local areas across the country. Access The Local Basket of Health Inequalities Indicators.

The national target for health inequalities aims to narrow the gap in life expectancy across geographical areas and to narrow the gap in infant mortality between social groups.

The Local Basket of Health Inequality Indicators was developed to capture some of the diversity and complexity surrounding local health inequalities. It aims to help primary care trusts and local authorities by providing data they can choose to use to track progress against local priorities for action on health inequalities.

It could be used to:

• support local partnerships' priorities for action by providing information on the current state of health inequalities
• support annual health reviews and equity audits
• provide indicators for service planning and performance management
• to identify measures of local success.

Access further details about the indicators and the latest updates.