Health Survey for England

The Health Survey for England series was designed to monitor trends in the health, and health related behaviours, of adults and children in England. The survey is used to estimate the proportion of people in England who have health conditions, and the prevalence of risk factors and behaviours associated with certain health conditions. The surveys provide regular information that cannot be obtained from other sources.

For some statistics such as height, weight, overweight and obesity, smoking,  general health, longstanding illness and acute sickness data from the 1990s onwards are published in trend tables. Other trend tables, e.g. hypertension cover the period 2003-2019.

There are many questions and topics covered by the series of surveys and some questions are not reported in the publications each year.

Information about the methodology used is included in the annual reports.  Information about changes in methodology and other methodology reports can be found via the links in the resources section below.