Monitoring the Health of Urban Populations: What Statistics Do We Need?

Colin Thunhurst and Alison Macfarlane

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 1992, vol. 155, issue 3, 317-338

Abstract: Debate about how to obtain the statistics needed to monitor the health of the population has been stimulated by a resurgence of interest, both nationally and locally, in public health. At the moment, it is clear that data systems are not up to the task. Existing national data collection systems are largely concentrated on measuring mortality and monitoring the activities of health services. Thus, work done so far has had to rely on proxy indicators of health, rather than those which would be recommended ideally. In the face of this, central government has started to discuss how to monitor and promote the health of the population. Also, over the past 10 years, health and local authorities have started to search for data to guide them in targeting the activities that they undertake to improve the health of their populations. This has highlighted the need to extend the limited range of morbidity data currently collected. Before constructing new data collection systems, which might themselves be equally inappropriate, it is essential to clarify the questions to be asked, however. There is a need to decide how concepts such as ‘health’ and ‘deprivation’ should be defined, to determine how appropriate data can be collected and to select the analytical methods to be used.

Date: 1992
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2307/2982888

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jorssa:v:155:y:1992:i:3:p:317-338

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://ordering.onli ... 1111/(ISSN)1467-985X

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A is currently edited by A. Chevalier and L. Sharples

More articles in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A from Royal Statistical Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().