The Central Statistics Office today released the latest publication in its series of Census 2011 results, showing that a total of 68,372 persons, accounting for 13.2% of the population in County Cork, had a disability in April 2011. This compares with 13% of the population for the State as a whole.
Today’s publication, “Profile 8 Our Bill of Health – Health, Disability and Carers in Ireland”, presents a profile of the health of the Irish population, focusing in detail on disability and carers who provide unpaid assistance.
Deirdre Cullen, Senior Statistician at the CSO: “This report provides further analysis of a number of important themes from the census 2011 results. Firstly it examines disability, looking in detail at the people with a disability from the point of view of family status, living arrangements, education, work and the different type of disabilities that affect people. The second theme in this report is the general health of the population which analyses responses to a new question on general health looking in detail at various aspects such as social class, disability and marital status. The report also profiles carers in Ireland – those who provide unpaid assistance for a friend or family member with a long-term illness, health problem or disability, and includes for the first time new results on children who act as carers.”
The full report is available on the CSO website at www.cso.ie/census along with all the data which is available in a range of interactive web tables, allowing users to build their own tables by selecting the data they are interested in and downloading it in an easy to use format for their own analysis.
Ms Cullen concluded “This report provides an overview of the health of the Irish people in 2011, particularly those who suffer a disability, and the people who care for family and friends in poor health or with a disability. The report contains yet more analysis and results from census 2011 on these important themes including new information on the general health of the population which was asked for the first time in an Irish census in 2011. Further details on these results, and all census data, from county level right down to town, electoral division and Small Area level is available on the census page of the CSO web site.”
Some results for County Cork:
Disability
A total of 68,372 persons in Cork, accounting for 13.2% of the population of the county, had at least one disability in April 2011. Of these 33,393 (48.8%) were male while 34,979 (51.2%) were female.
The most common disability overall was a difficulty with pain, breathing or other chronic illness or condition which was experienced by 44.6% of disabled people in the county; this was followed by a difficulty with basic physical activities, experienced by 41.7%. Both disabilities were strongly age-related.
Health
A question on general health was introduced for the first time in Census 2011 and asked respondents to rate their general health in one of five categories from very good to very bad. Self-perceived health provides a well validated and widely used measure of actual health, despite its subjective nature.
Overall, 61.8% of people in County Cork had very good health with a further 27.2% indicating that their health was good. 7,036 people (1.4%) indicated that they had bad or very bad health.
Carers
The census showed that a total of 22,428 persons or 4.3% of the total population of County Cork were providing unpaid assistance to others in April 2011. Of these carers 13,544 (60.4%) were women and 8,884 (39.6%) men. These carers provided a total of 756,954 hours of care per week.
It also showed that 545 children aged under 15 years were engaged in providing care to others, accounting for 2.4% per cent of all carers in the county.