ASSESSING THE ABILITY OF SOCIAL INNOVATIONS TO INCREASE HEALTHY LIFE YEARS
The European Union has adopted Healthy Life Years (HLY), based on the Global Activity Limitation Indicator, as its preferred health expectancy for comparing countries and defining health targets. One such target is that of the European Innovation Partnership on Healthy and Active Ageing to increase HLY by 2 years between 2010 and 2020. We assessed the ability of the exemplar social innovations (SIs) identified on the database, to increase HLY. We searched for evaluations of the 157 exemplar SIs and categorised their outcome measures into a five point typology graded A (direct link to HLY) to E (no evaluation found). Only 2 Sis were graded A, and it was impossible to assess the impact on HLY for 90% (n=142) which were graded D or E. We also developed a 'HLY Modeller' in Microsoft Excel for users to explore the potential impact of a SI on population health (http://www.innovage.group.shef.ac.uk/healthy-life-years.html).
