Abstract
BackgroundThe ability to measure regional health inequalities across Europe and to build adequate population health indices depends significantly on the availability of reliable and comparable data at the regional level. Within the scope of the EU-funded project EURO-HEALTHY, a Population Health Index (PHI) was built. This model aggregates 39 indicators considered relevant by experts and stakeholders to evaluate and monitor population health on the regional level within the European Union (269 regions). The aim of this research was to assess the data availability for those indicators. As a subsequent aim, an adequate protocol to overcome issues arising from missing data will be presented, as well as key messages for both national and European statistical authorities meant to improve data collection on population health.MethodsThe methodology for the study includes three consecutive phases: (i) assessing the data availability for the respective indicators at the regional level for the last year available (ii) applying a protocol for missing data and completing the database and (iii) developing a scoring system ranging from 0 (no data available; worst) to 1 (all data available; best) to evaluate the availability of data by indicator and EU region.ResultsAlthough the missing data on the set of the PHI indicators was significant, the mean availability score for the EURO-HEALTHY PHI indicators is 0.8 and the regional availability score is 0.7, which reveal the strength of the indicators as well as the data completeness protocol for missing data.ConclusionsThis study provides a comprehensive data availability assessment for population health indicators from multiple areas of concern, at the EU regional level. The results highlight that the data completeness protocol and availability scores are suitable tools to apply on any indicator’s data source mapping. It also raises awareness to the urgent need for sub-national data in several domains and for closing the data gaps between and within countries. This will require policies clearly focused on improving equity between regions and a coordinated effort from the producers of data (the EU28 national statistics offices and EUROSTAT) and the stakeholders who design policies at EU, regional and local level.
Highlights
The ability to measure regional health inequalities across Europe and to build adequate population health indices depends significantly on the availability of reliable and comparable data at the regional level
Data collection The data collection of the indicators to be included in the EURO-HEALTHY Population Health Index (PHI) was done between November 2015 and July 2016, mainly using major international data sources (EUROSTAT and WHO), considering data for the period 2000–2015 and at the regional level
Data was collected from official statistics, with the EUROSTAT database comprising 80% of the indicators and the WHO Health for all database (WHO/Europe) a total of 15% (Table 2)
Summary
The ability to measure regional health inequalities across Europe and to build adequate population health indices depends significantly on the availability of reliable and comparable data at the regional level. Within the scope of the EU-funded project EURO-HEALTHY, a Population Health Index (PHI) was built. This model aggregates 39 indicators considered relevant by experts and stakeholders to evaluate and monitor population health on the regional level within the European Union (269 regions). To better understand why some populations are healthier than others and to take action which will improve health and reduce inequalities, monitoring should go far beyond measuring health outcomes [8]. The task of monitoring population health inequalities using indicators from multiple dimensions calls for the availability of spatially disaggregated data at various levels. Having sound data is vital to identify gaps and better understand policy impacts, which will enhance informed decision-making [5, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
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