The Health Survey for England (HSE) is a series of annual surveys designed to measure health and health related behaviours in adults and children, in England.

It has a series of core elements that are included every year and special topics that are included in selected years.

• Core topics include: general health; smoking, drinking and fruit and vegetable consumption; height; weight; blood pressure measurements and blood and saliva samples.
• Special topics include: cardiovascular disease; physical activity; accidents; lung function measurement and certain blood analytes.

Accessing HSE datasets

The datasets from the Health Survey for England are available from the UK Data Archive via their ESDS website.

Note: it takes at least 4 months from publication for the latest datasets to be available.

• Full details on how to access the resources are available on the UK Data Archive sign up page
• If the data you require is unavailable on the UK Data Archive please contact us at enquiries@ic.nhs.uk

For earlier publications, please see the Department of Health (DH) website.

August 2011 note

Errors have been identified in the two derived variables for GHQ12 in several HSE datasets. The derived variables affected are GHQ12SCR and GHQG2. GHQ12 data in the HSE publications themselves are, however, unaffected. The corrections necessary were carried out across all affected datasets available on the UK data archive www.data-archive.ac.uk in August 2011, with the exception of the GHQ variables in the 1995 dataset (see below for further details).

Download the full details on this error

November 2009 note

As a result of detailed validation carried out during the production of the HSE 2008, an error was identified in the HSE series. The error relates to childhood obesity data for the years 1995 to 2007 inclusive and will affect all publications during these years.

In order to address this, an amended table (Children's overweight and obesity prevalence, by survey year, age-group and sex 1995 – 2007) was published on 19 November 2009 with an accompanying errata note. These can both be viewed below:

• download the errata note including details of this error and the correction (pdf 20KB)
• download a revised version of the Children Table 4, Children's overweight and obesity prevalence, by survey year, age-group and sex 1995 - 2007 (xls 151KB).

References to these figures within the publications prior to 2008 have not been corrected, as the changes are small. Some figures within the reports, referring to the children's categories of overweight or obese may be slightly different, but none are significantly different.

All figures in the HSE 2008 main report and trend tables have been calculated using the correct methodology. The time series data for 1995 to 2007 have been updated using the correct methodology within the HSE 2008 and HSE 2008 trend tables.

The NHS IC and the National Centre for Social Research apologise for any inconvenience caused by these errors.