Healthy Life Expectancy
Healthy life expectancy partitions ordinary life expectancy into the years a person can expect to live in good health and the years expected to be lived with disability or ill health. Building on the life table, the classic Sullivan method weights each age interval's person-years by the prevalence of good health, so the resulting expectancy answers not just 'how long will people live?' but 'how many of those years will be healthy?'. It has become a headline summary of population health, reported by the World Health Organization as HALE and tracked alongside life expectancy to judge whether longer lives are also healthier lives.
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Sources
- Sullivan, D. F. (1971). A single index of mortality and morbidity. HSMHA Health Reports, 86(4), 347–354. link ↗
- Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Healthy Life Expectancy (Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy). ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/demography/healthy-life-expectancy
Which method?
Set this method beside its closest kin and read them side by side — the library lays the books on the table; the choice is yours.
- Life TableDemography↔ compare
- Multistate Life TableDemography↔ compare
- Sullivan MethodDemography↔ compare
- Years of Life LostDemography↔ compare