Eurostat Health Statistics

Data Collection Type
Additional collated sources of health information-European/International
Organisation

Eurostat

Year established

1953

Statement of purpose

Health statistics are used to monitor the EU Health strategy, the EU Strategy on health and safety at work and their contribution to the Europe 2020 strategy. They have a key role to support the elaboration of evidence-based policies both at national and European levels.

Those statistics also serve for calculating indicators of the health portfolio used for the monitoring of the social protection and social inclusion and the set of indicators known as the European Core Health Indicators (ECHI) and are part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Coverage (geographical and temporal)

EU

Data collection commenced in 1953 and is ongoing.

Description/Summary

Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the EU. It collects and collates data on a wide range of themes including health statistics. The data is categorised under two main headings: public health and health and safety at work.

Under public health, some of the sub-headings include: health status (e.g. self-reported health and morbidity), health determinants (e.g. overweight and obesity, tobacco and alcohol consumption), healthcare (e.g healthcare expenditure, healthcare resources), morbidity (e.g diagnosis-specific morbidity), disability (e.g. prevalence of disability, employment of disabled persons) and causes of death (e.g. national and regional mortality data by causes of death).

Under health and safety at work, sub-headings include: Accidents at work, occupational diseases and other work- related health problems.

Data users

- Academic researchers
- Policy-makers
- Journalists.

Data content

Public health data; health and safety at work data. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/estat-navtree-portlet-prod/BulkDownloadListing?sort=1&dir=dic

Data dictionary

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/health/data

Equity stratifiers

Sex, age, education, income quintile, place of residence, occupation, disability.

Data collection methodology

Eurostat sends out a request for data annually to statistical authorities within each member state, which is collated for publication. A collaborative data collection has been developed by Eurostat, the OECD and the WHO as a harmonised approach to data collection of non-monetary healthcare statistics in order to reduce the data collection burden on countries. Eurostat applies specific methodology to ensure that the data is comparable.

Clinical coding scheme

International statistical Classification of Diseases and related health problems - ICD-10 Volume 2

Size of national collection

N/A.

Publication frequency

Updated release calendars are available on the website. Data is updated on a daily basis.

Accessing data

ALL European statistics are available in the database on Eurostat website.

Open data portal access

No.

Telephone contact
Other comments

Eurostat was established in 1953 and has broadened its remit since then to collate a range of data including health data.