Home sweet home

The Teenage Supported Housing Pilot, one of the nine Child Poverty pilots, involved seven local authorities in a project that provided assistance to teenage parents, focusing on 16 and 17 year olds or those not living with parents. In its final evaluation, the researchers for the Department for Education stressed the importance of flexible delivery and the role played by frontline staff. The Whitehall II study continues to offer further insights. One of the latest relates to the effect of housing on the mental health of older people. Researchers looked at data from the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) for the cohort, which was administered six times as part of the Whitehall II study of British civil servants from 1989-2005. This study supports the view that it is housing quality and financial security, rather than home ownership, that impact on the mental health of older people. The Housing Learning And Improvement Network has published a series of briefing papers that consider the implications for the housing sector of the government's health and social care agenda.

Smoothing things out

Spearhead groups were set up in 2001 to help England's most deprived areas in achieving health inequalities targets. By just over halfway through the programme, it became clear that these targets were not going to be reached and that progress was uneven amongst the Spearhead groups. A report from SDO NIHR looks at the reasons behind the inequalities in results and draws some conclusions on effective ways to tackle inequalities in health, looking in detail at cardiovascular disease, teenage pregnancy and cancer. Unusually, the report's authors used qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), which its authors suggest is better at analysing complex causal patterns, as are found in health inequalities.

The bigger picture

Covered widely in the press is the unhappy news that the UK population has the highest prevalence of obesity in the EU. And that within the UK, the West Midlands has highest levels, at 29% of the adult population. The figures come from an EU-wide database of health inequalities indicators, I2SARE, which has just published its 2006 data. Other areas where the UK is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons are teenage pregnancies, infant mortality and female cancer care. UK leads for the project at NEPHO provide some analysis.

Good, but not good enough

Responding to the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group (TPIAG) 2007/08 annual report, Children's Minister Dawn Primarolo called on local authorities and health trusts to continue to prioritise this area of work. Since the start of the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1997, the under-18 conception rate has fallen by 10.7 per cent and teenage conceptions leading to live births haven fallen by 23.3 per cent. Following recommendations from TPIAG and others, the government has announced that from 2011 sex and relationship education will form an element of Personal Social and Health Education, which in turn becomes a statutory part of the school curriculum.