Author(s): Albrecht, Jahn ; Bloemenkamp, Kitty W. M. ; Hannaford, Philip ; Olsen, Jorn ; Silva, Miguel Oliveira da ; Temmerman, Marleen
Date: 2006
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/6183
Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
Subject(s): Health policy; Monitoring; Reproductive health
The main impact of the World Health Organization’s Health for All 2000 programme was probably related to its focus upon using health indicators as health policy goals rather than productivity or cost alone. The vision was that healthcare planning would be prepared by people with expertise in public health, clinical medicine as well as economics and management. Health professionals should outline the paths to achieve these goals, and the managers should estimate how much it would cost and let the politicians make the final decisions. The hope was that the decision process would be related to health parameters and that the progress would be transparent for the taxpayers, so that achievements could be monitored. The philosophy of this approach is still worth pursuing, but the first condition for such a planning process is to identify relevant health indicators that can be monitored over time. If we have no such indicators, we do not know whether we are on the right track; we may not even know where we are. In many European countries, there are few available reproductive health indicators that are measured routinely. We have reports on age at first childbirth, fertility and maternal mortality. However, not many other indicators of reasonable validity exist for Europe, even among European Union (EU) member states.
