By Marjory Inglis, medical reporter

Residents of North East Fife are living longer than people in every other area of Scotland.

But elsewhere in Fife, where there are unemployment black spots, higher than the Scottish average rates of smoking and more ill health, the gaps between richer and poorer citizens are widening.

That’s the conclusion to be drawn from a mass of statistics published yesterday by NHS Health Scotland, which has drawn up health and well- being profiles for every Scottish parliamentary constituency.

Though Scotland has long been tagged the “sick man of Europe” because of relatively high rates of cancer, heart disease and stroke, the newly-published profiles show huge drops in the overall deaths from heart disease, strokes and lung cancers.

However, there is clearly still plenty of work to do with more than 19,000 deaths a year in Scotland attributed to smoking and over 13,000 drug-related.

Predictably, given the acknowledged link between poverty and deprivation and poor health, the main indicator “highlights” show Dundee and Kirkcaldy comparing “worse” than the average statistics for Scotland as a whole.

No less predictably, the predominantly middle-class constituencies of Perth, North East Fife and North Tayside, where residents enjoy high rates of employment, fewer people claiming income support, better diet and more positive lifestyle choices, the indicator highlights compare “better” than the Scottish average.

Residents of North East Fife enjoy the highest life expectancy in Scotland at 77.6 years for men and 82.3 years for women.

Where some constituencies have as many as 50% of the population smoking, in North East Fife the prevalence of smoking is 27.4%, among the lowest in Scotland.

In Kirkcaldy, men can expect to live less long than their fellow Fifers further north at just 74.1 years, with women in the Kirkcaldy area also having a lower life expectancy at 78.9 years.

Smoking prevalence was also markedly higher at 37.4%.

NHS Fife has stated that health improvement policies aim to reduce the gap in health between people living in different parts of Fife.

The organisation also wants to encourage people to “make healthy choices” and reduce the number of people who develop life-threatening illnesses.

NHS Tayside also has responsibility for delivering services to a population that shows a wide diversity of life opportunities, health and well being.

In North Tayside eight out of ten “indicator highlights” were better than the Scottish average.

Both Dundee East and Dundee West constituencies showed worse than the Scottish average in nine out of 10 indicators.

Dundee East showed one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country, 70.2% above the Scottish average.

The constituency profile also showed an average household income lower than the Scottish average, fewer school leavers going on to higher education, higher than the Scottish average numbers of people unable to work through disability or illness, almost 40% of the population smoking and a higher than Scottish average number of teenagers being admitted to hospital due to alcohol.

Nevertheless, NHS Tayside’s director of public health Dr Drew Walker insisted this was not a “hopeless situation.”

He stressed there was a lot of work already being undertaken to address problems such as smoking, obesity and poor breast feeding rates in a bid to improve health.

Much of that work was being done in co-operation with local authorities that were investing in programmes to improve diet and increase physical activity among school children.

In Dundee the city council is in the process of employing 41 eating for health assistants, who will start working in schools from May, trying to encourage children to make healthy choices in the food they eat.

His own organisation had employed a dietician to develop an obesity strategy, believed to be a first in Scotland.

Dr Walker stressed there were no “quick fixes” for the problems and they would have to be addressed on a long-term basis but remained positive.

“This is not some kind of hopeless situation we cannot do anything about,” he said. “That is not the case.

“There is quite a lot that can be done to begin to reverse the trend of this widening gap between the affluent and the poor.”

Individual profiles for all 73 constituencies can be viewed at www.healthscotland.com/profiles