HE1
Improve Physical Health
Physical Health
Health
Improve Physical Health
Physical health pertains to your body’s state, including factors such as illnesses, injuries, or health conditions. Physical health can be affected by lots of things including:
- Lifestyle choices, which encompass your dietary habits, level of physical activity, sleep patterns, and behaviors like smoking.
- Biological factors, including your genetics and overall body composition.
- Medical attention, involving the identification and management of any illnesses or injuries you may experience.
Our physical health significantly impacts various aspects of our lives, including our cognitive and emotional well-being, as well as our interactions with others. Conversely, our mental health, comprising our thoughts and emotions, can also influence our physical well-being.
Key Value
A monetised social value of £15,300
This is the monetised value of 1 person having ‘good’ physical health as opposed to ‘poor’ for a year.
There are existing values relating to different shifts in physical health, and there are validated (tried and tested) ways to most accurately ask about physical health.
The values are guided by government policy (The Green Book) and sophisticated research into the relationship between physical health and wellbeing (measured by life satisfaction.) The Green Book recommends that life satisfaction is expressed as £ monetised wellbeing, using the value of £13,000 for 1 WELLBY, over one year (see section on life satisfaction.)
Research using national datasets can estimate the isolated impact of a change in physical health on life satisfaction, after accounting for important controls such as age, health, socio-economics and other demographics. This research has been done by State of Life (The WELLBY Value Guide), which found that even after accounting for all these other factors, a change from ‘poor’ physical health to ‘good’ physical health is associated with an increase in life satisfaction by 1.001 (Table 1 in the above link). Therefore this change in physical health is worth 1.001 WELLBYs, or 1.001*£13,000 = £13,016 (rounded to £13,000).
Adjusted for inflation to 2023 prices 15,273. Our approach to inflation adjustments is explained on our Methodology page HERE
An overall rounded value of £15,300.
How to measure Improving Physical Health
If you’re just starting out, start with Bronze first. The result of a Bronze measurement is just an estimate, but requires the least effort; whereas Silver and Gold give more accurate results but require more effort.
Each level has an effort to accuracy indicator, choose the one that’s right for you.
Bronze
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Multiply the proportion of your participants you expect to report substantially improved physical health by £15,300
APPLYING THE WELLBY VALUE: Consider the proportion of your participants you expect to move from ‘poor’ to ‘good’ physical health. Multiply this by £15,300 to obtain a value per person.
If you can’t ask people directly about their physical health, because you’re unable to survey them, or this is a plan for a future project, then you can use this value as a proxy for an improvement in physical health. It’s an estimate of what the impact of an intervention that’s effective at improving physical health (from ‘poor’ to ‘good’) might produce.
Here’s an example
You plan a programme which supports people with diabetes to access treatment. You anticipate 10 people will take part, and you anticipate some (say 7 out of 10) will report improved physical health and those who don’t will continue to be supported and referred to other services. (It’s important to be realistic about how many of your target group will reach the desired outcome; it’s unlikely all of them will, e.g 7/10 = 0.7). Therefore you estimate 0.7*£15,300 = £10,710 value person. Applied to 10 people who started means a total of £10,710*10 = £107,100 monetised social value.
Silver
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Consider what categories of physical health you might shift people from and to. Therefore you can calculate an estimate of the overall shift, by applying the appropriate WELLBY values.
APPLYING THE WELLBY VALUE: Consider what categories your participants might realistically be starting in. Then consider what categories they might realistically shift to. Calculate the difference, which will give you a net change in each category. Multiply these net changes by the corresponding WELLBY values.
This table outlines the WELLBY value which will be applied. They all come from The WELLBY Value Guide (Table 1) by State of Life and use data from Understanding Society. The coefficients indicate the difference in life satisfaction associated with being in each category. ‘Poor’ is the base group which others are compared to, hence why the coefficient and the value are both 0. Values for the other categories are all compared to the ‘poor’ group.
| Coefficient on Life Satisfaction | WELLBY VALUE | |
|---|---|---|
| Poor | 0.000 | £0 |
| Fair | 0.617 | £9,400 |
| Good | 1.001 | £15,300 |
| Very Good | 1.172 | £17,900 |
| Excellent | 1.326 | £20,200 |
This helps to understand the scale of shifts, but we recommend thinking about the group as a whole, rather than thinking about shifts for individual people.
Here’s an example
You run a jogging and exercise group for women. Realistically participants are not suffering from ill-health, but it’s aimed at people who are physically inactive. You estimate half the participants have ‘fair’ health and half have ‘good’ health. Through taking part in the jogging and exercise group for three months, you estimate there will be some shift; e.g. a quarter still have ‘fair’ health, half still have ‘good’ health, but now a quarter have ‘very good’ health.
Next you calculate the shift in each category (below). There is a shift in the ‘fair’ category of -25% * £9,400 = -£2,350, but this is outweighed by the shift in the ‘excellent’ group (+25%*£17,900 = £4,475). Summing the values gives £2,125 social value per person. This can be multiplied by the number of people who take part in the exercise group.
| Comparison Group (Estimated %) | Intervention Group (Estimated %) | Change (I-C) | Value (to be applied) | Value of change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poor | 0% | 0% | 0% | 0 | £0 |
| Fair | 50% | 25% | -25% | £9,400 | -£2,350 |
| Good | 50% | 50% | 0% | £15,300 | £0 |
| Very Good | 0% | 25% | 25% | £17,900 | £4,475 |
| Excellent | 0% | 0% | 0% | £20,200 | £0 |
| TOTAL VALUE (per person | £2,125 |
Gold
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised value: Measure actual amounts of difference that improved physical health makes to people’s lives.
At Gold level you are looking to build on your silver estimations by engaging with the person or people affected.
Therefore, at the Gold level, you should survey users about their actual levels of wellbeing rather than using the proxy value.
There are many options for surveying people on their wellbeing.
A good starting point for questions to ask directly through primary research with your stakeholders is the Maximise Your Impact Guide. This guide covers 10 overall impact questions. For Gold level practice you would be looking to understand the question ‘what changes do people experience?’ and ‘how much of each change happened’. Questions you might want to include in your survey to uncover the outcomes they experience could include:
- What changed for you (or happened to you) as a result of our activity or programme?
- Were there any other changes?
- Did these changes lead on to anything else?
- Were the changes all positive?
- Were any of them unexpected?
- What did you want to happen?
- How did your situation/ circumstances affect your experience?
A starting point for questions related to wellbeing is to look at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing website: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measure-wellbeing/ .
As you start to measure wellbeing directly from the people affected, one set of questions it is important to consider is the ONS4 – the national measures for subjective wellbeing in the UK which asks the following 4 questions on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’:
- Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
- Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things that you do in your life are worthwhile?
- Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
- On a scale where 0 is ‘not at all anxious’ and 10 is ‘completely anxious’, how anxious did you feel yesterday overall?
You could also consider other data gathering activities, including direct observation, or focus groups.
How is physical health measured?
When surveying participants directly you should use validated (tried and tested) questions. The most commonly used measure of Physical health is from Understanding Society. The question should be asked in exactly this way:
“In general, would you say your health is…” [Excellent, Very good, Good, Fair, Poor]
Support in developing your Gold survey approach is available through the Measure Up partners, so please do reach out to Impact, State of Life or PRD.
| Value Type: | Master outcome |
What's this?
This is the type of value. Some values are outcomes, which means many different interventions might lead to them, others are specific interventions that have a set value. |
|---|---|---|
| UN SDG Categories: |
|
What's this?
The UN Sustainable Development Goals are global goals adopted in 2015 for all signed up nations to achieve for us to have a sustainable global future by 2030. There are 17 Goals that address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. |
| PN06/20 Categories: |
|
What's this?
PPN 06/20 Taking account of social value in the award of central government contracts introduced the Central Government Social Value Model in 2020 which all Central Government contracting authorities must use in their in scope procurements. It consists of 5 themes, 8 policy outcomes, and 24 Model Award Criteria which outline key priority areas to achieve more social value. |
Evidence
Measure Up focuses on empowering you to numerically measure the impact you’re having. We recommend that numeric reports are backed up with stories and other types of evidence to help illustrate, in human terms, the impact that’s being made on individuals.
We recommend seeing consent from one or more participants in your intervention to collect and tell their story. This should include a little background on the participant, a summing up of life before the intervention, the human impact of the intervention, and the longer term (if known) impact on the person’s life outside of, and after, the intervention.
Providing photographs, audio recordings, video interviews or even artefacts from the intervention (for example, writing, paintings, music, etc from creative interventions) can add more colour, and convey the emotional impact of interventions more directly.
In some cases it’s appropriate to anonymise or abbreviate the personal information of case study participants. No story should be published or shared without the recorded consent of the individual(s) it concerns. Individuals continue to own the rights to their stories and if they request you stop sharing the story or making it available online you should do so promptly and without need for justification.
Feedback
Measure Up is an open, collaborative and transparent. If you have any suggestions or feedback on our pragmatic, recommended approach to measuring and valuing social value, including wellbeing, economic, and fiscal impact, and effects on our environment, please get in touch so we can share and discuss this at our next Advisory Group meeting.
More help
We want to empower anyone to perform and improve their impact measurement – without needing a degree in economics.
If you need any more help, or just someone to do the legwork for you we can help signpost you to software, training and consultancy to help you get to grips with the impact you’re having.
