HEALTH problems suffered by people in Cumbria have been linked to deprivation.

County health boss Peter Rooney said issues such as obesity, excess weight, smoking, excessive alcohol and mental health use can all be “correlated” to areas with high deprivation levels.

Barrow and Copeland are among those places recording high levels of deprivation. Twelve per cent of children in Cumbria live in low-income families.

Mr Rooney, a member of the county’s health and wellbeing board, was commenting on a new 10-year public health strategy for Cumbria.

It has been drawn up by Colin Cox, Cumbria County Council’s director of public health, following talks and a three-month consultation.

Covering the period 2019-20, it aims to shape the county’s health priorities over the coming decade and was discussed by the county council’s health and wellbeing board.

Its four goals are to ensure that people are healthy and make positive choices about their wellbeing, that they remain independent and healthy for longer, that they can access the right services in the right place at the right time, and that service demand reduces and satisfaction rates increase.

Mr Rooney said “reducing health inequalities” – the differences in health between poor areas and wealthy areas of Cumbria – was an important goal.

He said: “This is really good work. I love that that the strategy is a short document that’s easy to read and it covers all the right ground.

“On healthy weights, there’s an absolute correlation between obesity and deprivation. There’s also a slight correlation between excess weight and deprivation.

“The same applies to smoking rates and excessive alcohol use – that’s an inequality issue. It is also very much a feature of children’s health and wellbeing, and mental health.”

Mr Cox said the consultation on the strategy ran from November 1 to January 31, and the support for it was “generally very positive.”

“One of the strengths of this strategy is that it will help us to draw a lot of different documents fit together, within the four key priorities we have got,” said Mr Cox.

Anthony Gardner, director of planning and performance on the Morecambe Bay clinical commissioning group, also praised the new strategy.

“It’s important we are setting out some ambitions about what we intend to achieve over that 10-year period in terms of the big-ticket items that face us, particularly health inequalities and life expectancy,” he said.