YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

Health and wellbeing of young people  223 RUDI KLANJŠEK AND ANDREJ NATERER 6. HEALTH AND WELLBEING OF YOUNG PEOPLE Good health affects people’s quality of life and life expectancy, but also contributes to personal (physical/mental/emotional) well-being and self-esteem. Healthy young people are more successful in education and the workplace, so investing in and maintaining young people’s health sig- nificantly reduce pressure on national health systems and the budget, and make a positive contribution to the labourmarket (EUYouth Report, 2015). Not surprisingly, health as a comprehensive state of physical, mental, and social well-being (Musil, 2010) is consequently defined as one of the eleven key areas of the European Youth Strategy 2019-2027 (Csuday, 2019), which seeks to “promote mental and sexual health, sport, physical activity and a healthy lifestyle, and the prevention and treatment of injuries, eating dis- orders, addiction and substance abuse” (Publications Office of the Europe- an Union, 2018: 61). Of course, health is also crucially important for young people. In the study Youth 2010 (Lavrič et al., 2010), health was shown to be the most important among fourteen values – 95%of young people said that health for themwas important or very important. Data from the European Statistical Office showthat Europeanyoungpeople (15-29) largelyassess theirhealthas (very) good – about 90% of young people share that assessment. Data also show that thementioned assessmentwithin the groupof young people appears as relatively stable in a longitudinal perspective (the assessment has been around 90% since the year of the first measurement, i.e. 2005); however, it decreases with the age of the respondents. Among those who are, for exam- ple, 65 years of age or older, only 40% still rate their health as good or very good. Nevertheless, it is certainly encouraging that the trend for this age group is positive (more andmore older people are feeling healthy). This also applies to Slovenia, which lags slightly behind the EU average in the overall health assessment (Figure 6.1).