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

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.