WHERE you live in Gwent has a huge bearing on how healthy you are and how well you feel.

A report published today, mapping the people of Wales' views about their own well-being, confirms and strengthens familiar health divides charted previously through levels of disease and deprivation.

Like a series of reports before it - the NHS Wales capacity review A Question of Balance, the Wanless Review of Health and Social Care in Wales, the recently-published 10-year NHS Wales plan Designed For Life - it sets healthcare planners the considerable challenge of how to narrow the gap.

The report is called Health in Wales, the work of the new Wales Centre for Health and the Local Government Data Unit for Wales. It is long on figures and short on suggestion, but it reveals Gwent to be a microcosm of the wider Wales situation.

Monmouthshire is revealed as one of the healthiest places in Wales, based on the views of its own population as collected in the 2001 Census.

Residents of neighbouring Blaenau Gwent however, do not believe themselves to be anywhere near as healthy. But they are not alone. The feelgood factor, in health terms, is also distinctly lower in Newport, Torfaen and Caerphilly.

By and large, people in the South Wales valleys have a more negative view of their health than those in many of the more rural and affluent parts of Wales. Monmouthshire fares well nationally, based on Census findings divided up by local authority, along with places such as the Vale of Glamorgan, Powys, and north Wales areas like Conwy, Denbighshire and south Flintshire.

The number of people who reported themselves as having a limiting long term illness also follows a similar pattern. Fewer than one-in-five did so in Monmouthshire - at 18.4 per cent the lowest in Wales - while more than a quarter did so in Blaenau Gwent, which at 27.6 per cent was the third highest.

Two other measures are highlighted -provision of unpaid care and the numbers of people who are permanently sick or disabled.

Of Gwent's five local authority areas, Newport recorded the lowest proportion of people who provide unpaid care, at 11.3 per cent of its population. This was the sixth lowest in Wales, with Torfaen the highest in Gwent.

Monmouthshire was the eighth lowest in Wales , but most of its unpaid carers provided less than 19 hours of care a week. It had the lowest level in Wales of unpaid carers providing more than 50 hours a week.

Blaenau Gwent had the fourth highest level in this category, which may be linked to it having the second highest percentage of men (14.90 and the third highest percentage of women (12.7) aged 16-74 classed as permanently sick or disabled.

Monmouthshire had the lowest percentage of such residents (6.1 per cent of men and 5.4 per cent of women).