HEALTH | 1993-2023
Then & Now: FROM 1993-2023
Santé launched in 1993, and featured the results of our nationwide survey on health and wellbeing. At the end of 2022, we asked the same questions to compare results three
HOW IS YOUR health? What illnesses, if any, worry you? Have your eating habits changed for the better? Do you sleep well? Are you anxious? We asked these and many more questions to our thousands of newsletter subscribers for one purpose: to compare the results to a health questionnaire carried out in 1992/3 that featured in the first issue of Top Santé. In many areas, we’re not much different, but in some, people’s attitudes and habits have changed – and not always all for the better. It’s no wonder many of us are stressed and anxious. The impact of Covid and worldwide lockdowns has, in some cases, done irreparable damage, not only to healthcare systems but individual psyches, too. Families are still disrupted, livelihoods lost. Mental health plummeted. Healthcare organisations are still coping with the aftermath. It was only to be expected that a fairly recent global pandemic would impact the responses of those who completed our survey. And yet, in many ways, we ought to be healthier as a nation; 30 years on.
FEELING OPTIMISTIC
The 1993 Top Santé national poll showed close to two thirds of people said their heath was “good”, and at least nine-out-of-10 people said their health was either “good” or “fair”. A tiny number – one per cent – described their health as “very bad”; even among the over-65s, this judgement was made by only one-in-every-25 people.
But the results showed that people tended to view their health in a more positive light than perhaps it was. “Tooth decay, constipation and obesity are so common that perhaps we think of them as inevitable, which of course they aren’t,” said the author of the 1993 report. Fast forward to 2023 and it’s a similar picture 30 years on, with 60 per cent – almost two-thirds of respondents – describing their ove, rest, sleep and career, in that order, with career success scoring pretty low in comparison to the others, by all accounts. Rest and sleep were “very” or “most” important to threein-five people, especially women.
This, according to the author of the report, was likely due to many women combining a career with raising a family. And we love their tip for domestic harmony in households where both partners work to share daily responsibilities for the house. ‘Husbands – get
