Background
Health Poverty Indices (HPI) are sophisticated summary measures of health inequalities at local and regional level that allow comparisons of different areas to be made. HPIs reflect the complex health and socio-economic factors involved in the generation of health and ill-health. A group’s health poverty is a combination of both its present state of health and its future health potential or lack of it.

The development of an Irish Health Poverty Index (iHPI) will focus attention on health inequalities on the island, the determinants of those inequalities, and the need for services to reduce the impact of poverty at local and regional levels.

An English HPI was developed by the Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO) after an extensive consultation process with users of information on health inequalities. This HPI has been evaluated and its development is continuing.

Aims
The overall goal of this project is to assess the feasibility of adapting the English HPI to the Irish context.

The aims are to:

• explore the relevance of the theoretical basis of the  English HPI to the island;
• investigate the possibility of using Irish data sources to measure ‘health poverty’ at local and regional levels;
• develop and evaluate a test version of an Irish HPI on the Observatory’s website;
• highlight data inadequacies and develop recommendations for improving data quality.

Progress report (updated July 2008)
Two prepublication reports reviewing the policy context, data availability and data issues have been prepared for Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Data collection is ongoing and a selection of indicators will be made available on the INIsPHO eData website in August 2008.

Contact: Steve Barron