Margozzini, Paula;
Tolonen, Hanna;
Bernabe-Ortiz, Antonio;
Cuschieri, Sarah;
Donfrancesco, Chiara;
Palmieri, Luigi;
Sanchez-Romero, Luz Maria;
... Oyebode, Oyinlola; + view all
(2024)
National health examination surveys; a source of critical data.
Bulletin of the World Health Organization
, 102
(8)
pp. 588-599.
10.2471/BLT.24.291783.
Preview |
Text
Mindell_BLT.24.291783.pdf Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to contribute technical arguments to the debate about the importance of health examination surveys and their continued use during the post-pandemic health financing crisis, and in the context of a technological innovation boom that offers new ways of collecting and analysing individual health data (e.g. artificial intelligence). Technical considerations demonstrate that health examination surveys make an irreplaceable contribution to the local availability of primary health data that can be used in a range of further studies (e.g. normative, burden-of-disease, care cascade, cost and policy impact studies) essential for informing several phases of the health planning cycle (e.g. surveillance, prioritization, resource mobilization and policy development). Examples of the use of health examination survey data in the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region (i.e. Finland, Italy, Malta and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) and the WHO Region of the Americas (i.e. Chile, Mexico, Peru and the United States of America) are presented, and reasons why health provider-led data cannot replace health examination survey data are discussed (e.g. underestimation of morbidity and susceptibility to bias). In addition, the importance of having nationally representative random samples of the general population is highlighted and we argue that health examination surveys make a critical contribution to external quality control for a country’s health system by increasing the transparency and accountability of health spending. Finally, we consider future technological advances that can improve survey fieldwork and suggest ways of ensuring health examination surveys are sustainable in low-resource settings.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | National health examination surveys; a source of critical data |
| Location: | Switzerland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.2471/BLT.24.291783 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.2471/blt.24.291783 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024 The authors; licensee World Health Organization. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution IGO License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/legalcode), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In any reproduction of this article there should not be any suggestion that WHO or this article endorse any specific organization or products. The use of the WHO logo is not permitted. This notice should be preserved along with the article’s original URL. |
| Keywords: | Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Public, Environmental & Occupational Health, POPULATION, RISK, HYPERTENSION, PREVALENCE, EVOLUTION, ENGLAND, POLICY, MEXICO, SCORE |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Epidemiology and Public Health |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10205163 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
