Men and health promotion in the United Kingdom: 20 years further forward?

Abstract

Despite overall improvements in life expectancy, rates of premature male mortality, particularly for men in areas of socioeconomic deprivation, remain an important issue of concern in the United Kingdom. Interventions to engage men and promote their health and wellbeing have developed, albeit sporadically, over recent decades in response to this health inequity. This paper provides a 10-year update on the state of men’s health promotion in the United Kingdom. It begins by highlighting changes in male life expectancy and possible explanations for these shifts, including a relative failure to address mental health promotion and male suicide, before providing detail about how practice approaches to men’s health promotion have evolved over the period 2005–2016. Such changes are not removed from the wider socioeconomic context. This paper therefore, then, considers movements in the policy context and possible influences of this before exploring the challenges that remain for men’s health promotion. We suggest that despite certain improvements in the practice of men’s health promotion and in men’s health outcomes, issues remain in terms of premature mortality, particularly for certain groups of men. We further suggest that many of the difficulties in improving and promoting the health of men further lie with a market-driven neoliberal policy context that engenders inequality through the inequitable distribution of and access to material resources and through individualistic approaches to health promotion that serve men from economically and socially disadvantaged locations least well.