Medway’s men’s health pledge puts local inequality on the agenda
Medway Council has become the first local authority in England to sign the Movember Men’s Health Charter, turning a national advocacy campaign into a local policy commitment with practical consequences for service design, outreach and data collection. The decision came after a formal motion to Full Council was unanimously supported by councillors present, placing men’s health squarely within the council’s public health agenda.
The timing reflects a hard clinical truth: men continue to die earlier than women, and the gap is not evenly distributed. In Medway, the life expectancy of a man is 78.7 years, 3.9 years lower than that of women in the area. Across the district, men are overrepresented among deaths under age 75, and the main contributors to early death remain familiar and stubbornly preventable—cancer, respiratory disease and circulatory disease. Those patterns are not abstract epidemiology. They map directly onto missed prevention opportunities, delayed presentation, and chronic exposure to risk factors that can accumulate over decades.
One figure stands out sharply. The life expectancy gap between men in the most deprived and least deprived areas of Medway is 10.4 years, with values of 72.7 years and 83.1 years respectively.
Deprivation, behaviour and chronic disease are converging in one population
The council’s own health profile makes clear that sex and socioeconomic status are interacting, not separate, drivers of poor outcomes. Men in Medway have worse rates of school readiness, NEET status and smoking than women, all of which can shape health trajectories long before a man ever enters primary care. Later in life, men living in the most deprived areas, as well as those with serious mental illness, smoking exposure, overweight or obesity, bear the heaviest burden of poor outcomes.
The clinical implications are straightforward. Higher smoking prevalence drives respiratory disease and cardiovascular risk. Excess weight compounds metabolic risk, worsens blood pressure control and increases the probability of later diabetes and vascular disease. Serious mental illness carries its own mortality penalty through both biological and social pathways, including fragmented access to care and higher rates of physical comorbidity. When those risks cluster in the same population, premature death becomes much more likely and health services face a more complex burden than any single programme can solve.
Men living in the most deprived parts of Medway are more likely to develop long-term conditions such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and cancer, experience poorer mental health outcomes and die prematurely. The council’s charter commitment therefore addresses a pattern that is already measurable in local mortality and morbidity data, not a future hypothetical.
Council leaders linked health policy to gendered barriers in care
Cllr Vince Maple, leader of Medway Council, framed the adoption of the charter as both a symbolic and operational shift. He pointed to the unanimous cross-chamber vote and the willingness of councillors to speak personally about their own experiences, describing the decision as an important step toward raising awareness of men’s mental health and improving life outcomes.
His remarks also acknowledged a central issue in men’s health: health systems are not always designed around the way men seek help, or delay seeking it. Gender norms can shape how symptoms are interpreted, how distress is expressed and how likely a person is to engage with support before disease becomes advanced. For public health teams, that means access is not only a matter of service availability. It is also a matter of fit, language and location.
Medway already has examples of locally tailored support. The Man vs Fat adult weight management programme addresses one of the most visible cardiometabolic risk factors, while Men in Sheds is aimed at improving men’s wellbeing through a social and community-based setting. Those programmes sit well within the broader logic of the charter: effective men’s health work often has to happen where men already are, not only where health systems would prefer them to be.
Data, outreach and commissioning now become the real test
The charter sets out a series of commitments that move beyond broad advocacy. Medway will appoint a senior executive member to lead on men’s health across the council, NHS and community services. It will also push for sex-disaggregated data on service use through the Health and Wellbeing Board, with a men’s health section added to the annual public health report.
Collecting the right data is not an administrative exercise. It is the foundation for deciding whether men are using services at the same rate as women, whether outreach is reaching deprived communities, and whether specific groups are being missed entirely. Without that information, men’s health interventions can be well intentioned but poorly targeted.
Funding is another key lever. Medway says grant support will be aligned with men’s health, including not only direct health activity but also culture and leisure initiatives that influence wellbeing. That wider framing matters because men’s health outcomes are shaped by social connection, physical activity, housing, work status and access to trusted spaces, not only by clinical appointments.
The charter also requires focus on the groups facing the worst outcomes, including men affected by ethnicity, disability, sexuality, economic deprivation and adverse life experiences. In practice, this means men’s health cannot be treated as a single demographic category. The risks faced by a middle-aged smoker in a deprived neighbourhood are not the same as those of a younger man with severe mental illness or a man whose access barriers are driven by disability or exclusion.
Tailored outreach may determine whether the strategy changes outcomes
Amy O’Connor, Movember’s Director for Policy and Advocacy in the UK and Europe, described Medway as leading the way as the first local authority in England to sign the charter. She linked the council’s move with recent national developments, including England’s first Men’s Health Strategy, while stressing that the scale of the challenge remains substantial.
The most concrete part of Medway’s plan is likely to be outreach. The council has committed to increasing uptake of health checks by tailoring outreach to men and delivering it in familiar settings. That is a sensible public health principle. Men who are not attending routine services may still respond to encounters in workplaces, sports settings, social venues or community spaces where help feels less formal and less stigmatising.
A Local Men’s Health Strategy will now be brought forward through the Health and Wellbeing Board, with input from local NHS providers and community partners. Men in Medway will also be consulted so that the strategy reflects lived experience rather than only institutional priorities. The success of the charter will depend on whether those consultations translate into measurable changes in screening, diagnosis, service uptake and mortality over time. Until then, the gap between symbolic commitment and health gain remains the central question for commissioners and clinicians alike.