Living Well: Health & Well-being

Living well helps you stay healthy and independent. Some lifestyle choices, like smoking, unhealthy eating, or not being active, can increase the risk of illness. Below are key health facts about Slough to help you understand the current challenges and make healthier choices.

Smoking

  • Smoking rates in Slough dropped from 15% in 2022 to 8.3% in 2023
  • This is much better than the national average of 11.6% and the Southeast at 10.6%.

Weight and Healthy Eating

  • In 2022/23, 58.2% of adults in Slough were overweight or obese - over 76,000 people. This is higher than the national average of 64%
  • Only 18.9% of adults ate the recommended ‘5-a-day’ fruits and vegetables, much lower than the national average of 31%.

Physical Activity

  • Only 56.6% of adults in Slough were physically active, doing 150+ minutes of activity per week.This is much lower than the national average of 67.1%
  • About 30.7% of adults were physically inactive, doing less than 30 minutes of activity per week.

Alcohol and Substance Use

  • In 2023/24, hospital admissions for alcohol-related conditions were 1.27 times higher than the national average, with about 777 cases
  • Premature deaths from liver disease were 1.46 times higher than the national average
  • 9.3% of opiate users completed and 48.5% of non-opiate users completed their treatment successfully in 2023
  • Both rates were better than similar deprived areas.

Cancer Screening

Cancer screening coverage in Slough is lower than the national average and similar deprived areas across all screening programmes.

Mental Health

  • In 2024, over 1,600 people in Slough were recorded with a serious mental health disorder
  • There were 2,003 new cases of depression in 2023, with numbers continuing to rise.
  • The suicide rate increased from 8.9 per 100,000 people (2020–2022) to 10.3 per 100,000 (2021–2023), with 40 recorded suicides of which 75% of those who died by suicide were male.

Heart and Circulatory Health

  • Slough’s under-75 mortality rate for circulatory disease was higher than in similar deprived areas in 2023.
  • Diabetes is more common in Slough compared to regional and national rates.

Premature Deaths

  1. In 2023, 404 people in Slough died before age 75. This accounted for 45% of all deaths in Slough, much higher than the national average of 31%.
  2. The main causes of premature death were:
  • Cancer - 29% of premature deaths.
  • Cardiovascular disease - 26% of premature deaths.

Office for Health Improvement and Disparities profiles