• A legal high is a drug that is not controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act and is therefore legal to possess.
• On 16 April 2010, mephedrone was made a Class B illegal drug.
• On 23 July 2010, naphyrone (NRG1) was made a Class B illegal drug.
• On 4 November 2010, the import of a chemical identified in samples of the legal high branded product Ivory Wave was banned.

Smoking is the single greatest preventable cause of death in the world today. There are more than one billion smokers worldwide – that’s one quarter of all adults – and it’s killing up to half the people who smoke.

• At least one in five adults in Northern Ireland may suffer from some form of common mental health disorder in any year.
• Research into public sector sickness absence highlighted that stress, depression, mental ill health and fatigue accounted for 23% of lost working days, at a cost of around £5.3m.
• In the Health and social wellbeing survey, 19% of the Northern Ireland population aged 16 and above scored four or more on GHQ12, indicating possible psychiatric morbidity.

Tackling Childhood Obesity

4,000 – that’s the number of people in Northern Ireland each year who die prematurely. That adds up to 61,000 years of life lost unnecessarily, with some groups affected much more than others.

Allotments are being recognised as a catalyst for encouraging sustainability, healthier living and social interaction as well as a resource for local food growing.

Research has shown that contact with the natural environment and green space promotes better physical and mental health, and self-esteem. Allotment schemes themselves are typically low-cost compared to the benefits they bring.

The PHA has taken as one of its building blocks ‘Building sustainable communities’, one of the core themes proposed by Sir Michael Marmot in his 2010 report Fair society, healthy lives. In this report, Marmot advocates that organisations should:

42% of households in Northern Ireland are living in fuel poverty.  (Northern Ireland Housing Executive, House Condition Survey 2011).

A household is in fuel poverty if, in order to maintain an acceptable level of temperature throughout the home, the occupants would have to spend more than 10% of their income on all household fuel use.

There are three factors which impact fuel poverty:

• Both poverty and economic inequality are bad for health.
• Persistent poverty in Northern Ireland (21% before housing costs) is double that in Great Britain (GB) (9%).
• In January 2010, 43,000 children in Northern Ireland were living in severe poverty.

The PHA is committed to partnership working to address health inequalities and improve the health and social wellbeing of the population in Northern Ireland. This includes working in collaboration with the community, voluntary, public, private and academic sectors to address factors that contribute to poverty and ill health, and to ensure a decent standard of living for all.