Self-Rated Health and Quality of Life of Elderly in Kerala

One of the markers of quality of life is life expectancy. Kerala was found to have high life expectancy among the states in India. However, life expectancy alone cannot be measure the quality of life because it does not consider the physical , social and emotional factors that impact their health for its estimation. So the present study estimated the health expectancy based on self rated health for assessing the quality of life of elderly in Kerala .Self-rated health status are taken from BKPAI survey and mortality data taken from SRS. The overall result shows that about one third of the elderly are living in poor health status. Females were more prone to perceive their health status as poor. Health expectancy shows a considerable reduction in all ages among both sexes. Females live relatively low quality of life than males, even though they have longer life expectancy. So the rapid growing elderly populations in the State need special attention in terms of health as well as social and economic security for achieving better quality of life.