Health Indicators and Health Systems Analysis

Abstract

The main points raised in this paper are:

• The solution proposed by a number of authors, i.e. a final result indicator expressed as a scale with several degrees, is not practical in the short run.

• It is not adequate to data at hand, and it presents the risk that useful information might be lost.

The health state is a very complex phenomenon. Even a superficial system analysis indicates that it presents four aspects:

• (a) the vulnerability aspect (exposure to risk factors like disease);

• (b) the morbidity aspect, itself being divided into several expressions depending on the agent (subjective, diagnostic or objective morbidity);

• (c) the protection aspect (by medical services and social insurance);

• (d) the result aspect (physical and mental validity, duration of life).

The problem remains that the information we possess is expressive, in the best case, of only one of these aspects.

Now, it is just as dangerous to highlight one of these to express the health status as it is to aggregate all of them because of weighting problems revealed.

The solution suggested here is a linked set of data on these four aspects, which has to be reordered in relation to each specific problem (priorities, choice of techniques, etc).