Whether the daily life of a place is one a person would choose: company, purpose, autonomy, the texture of an ordinary week. Measured from residents and families through the Council's survey instrument, not from an inspector's checklist.
Joyful Living Index
Two measures of a place to live, published side by side and never averaged into one number.
Inspection regimes across Europe measure whether a care home is safe and compliant. Almost nothing measures whether it is a life worth having. The Index exists for the second question, and it asks it of the people living the answer rather than of the operator's brochure.
It is deliberately two measures, not one. A home can be beautifully run for health and quietly joyless, or warm and poorly set up for keeping people well. Averaging those into a single figure hides exactly the difference a family is trying to see, so the Council reports them side by side and leaves the weighing to the reader.
Joyful Living
Healthspan
The qualities of a living environment associated with longer years in good health — the way the building, the programme and the services are set up. This is a measure of the environment and the lifestyle it supports. It is not a health outcome, and the Council makes no claim that it is one.
Cadence
Twice a year, as a cross-operator cycle over the same survey instrument that produces a facility's own feedback score. Building it as a second, separate mechanism would have been the wasteful reading of the brief.
Consent
The operator collects explicit consent from the resident or family, sees the results before anyone else, and has a one-week window to review them. The Council publishes anonymised aggregates only, and prints the response and exclusion counts alongside, so that a window that has been used is visible rather than invisible.
Status
The Index is in preparation. The first cycle runs as a contained pilot with one or two operators, and the version-zero methodology — built on validated instruments rather than invented ones, with a named scientific advisor behind it — is published before that pilot, not after. Nothing is scored until it is.
Nothing has been scored. There is no Index result to read yet, and no facility on the platform carries one. This page describes an instrument in preparation.
Not medical advice. The Healthspan measure describes a living environment and the lifestyle it supports. It is not a health outcome and is not a clinical assessment. Any statement about health, therapy or clinical outcome published by the Council is attributed to the named expert who made it, never asserted in the Council’s own voice. Always consult a doctor.
For operators considering the pilot
The first cycle runs with one or two operators willing to work through it properly. It means a data-processing agreement with the Council, a resident and family contact list the operator controls throughout, and one complete survey cycle with the results reviewed before anything is published.
The operator holds the consent relationship and the veto. The Council holds the questions and the arithmetic. An operator who comes out of it unconvinced can decline publication and keep the results.