Islanders live as long as they did a decade ago. They spend more of it ill.

Avoidable mortality has fallen from 211.5 per 100,000 in 2012 to 155.9 in 2024, a 26% reduction, and the clearest sustained improvement in Jersey’s published health data. The premature death rate has followed it down. Both are age-standardised, so neither is an artefact of the island’s changing age profile.

The same premature-death series with its published 95% confidence limits. This is the important caveat for every health figure on this page: on an island of 104,000 people the interval spans roughly 38 deaths per 100,000, so a year-on-year move inside that band is noise, not news. The downward trend is real because it runs across a decade, not because any single year fell.

opendata.gov.je, "Annual mortality" - Premature death rate; opendata.gov.je, "Health" - Adult obesity (Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey); opendata.gov.je, "Island Outcome Indicators" - Annual data (Government of Jersey Common Strategic Policy indicator set)

2024 recorded 860 deaths, close to the series high of 920 set in 2022 - the two years since have stayed elevated rather than reverting to the 2000s-2010s range of roughly 700-800 a year.

Obesity has risen from 12% of adults in 1999 to 21% in 2023; the combined overweight-or-obese figure now stands at 54%. Survey-based and self-reported, on a true numeric axis so the unequal spacing between survey years is visible rather than smoothed away.

opendata.gov.je, "Health" - Adult obesity (Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey)

Smoking has roughly halved, from 25% in 2005 to 13% in 2024. Hazardous drinking has not followed the same path: it was 25% in 2024, little changed from 21.1% in 2010, and consistently higher among men (33% vs 17% for women in 2024).

All-persons life expectancy peaked at 83.8 years in the 2019-21 window (the pandemic-era cohort) and has eased back since. Health-adjusted life expectancy figures also exist in the source resource from the 2016-18 window onward but are not shown here, to avoid mixing two different methodologies on one chart.

GP consultations dipped sharply in 2020 as COVID-19 disrupted in-person care, and by 2024 had recovered to 356,126 - slightly below the 2012 level of 363,601. Pharmacy spend has moved the other way, up 63% since 2012 to £19.1m in 2024 (plus £9.2m in dispensing fees) - a cost line that has grown even as the volume of GP visits has not.

Guernsey’s series starts at the 2013-15 window, three windows later than Jersey’s 2010-12 start, so the Guernsey line is shorter on the left. Both are all-persons life expectancy at birth; each island’s male/female breakdown is charted separately above and isn’t necessarily built the same way, so only the all-persons figure is compared here.