Article discusses health trends and life expectancy issues in the UK, suggesting systemic failures in government conversations.
In this article, we discuss the evidence of what has caused life expectancy trends across the UK to stop improving after 2012. This evidence has already been extensively reviewed in a report published by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) and subsequently as a book ( McCartney, et al, 2022b ; Walsh & McCartney, 2025 ). In order to bring the evidence to life, and to other audiences, we present the evidence through an imagined conversation that might have taken place in the UK Government’s Department of Health and Social Care in the autumn of 2024.
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McCartney et al. (2026) studied this question.
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