INDICATORS

3. Many Public Health Programme projects have proposed improved indicator
definitions or related data collection methods. These must be put to good use in
developing the shortlist.
4. Indicators have a tendency to become administrative tools that have only one
absolute interpretation, sometimes with unjustified claims of “transparency”.
However it is important to bear in mind that indicators are by nature rigorous
simplifications of reality and may thus have only limited value in helping us
understand the true nature of reality.
5. Closely connected to this is the realisation that harmonising indicators is not the
end-point, but only the beginning in the effort to understand time trends and
differences between countries or regions. This harmonisation should trigger further
investigation.
6. Finally, the purpose of the shortlist indicators is to produce a quick overview of the
broad area of public health.
3.6. Documentation Sheets
The idea of the Documentation Sheets is to present complete information on each of the
ECHI shortlist indicators in condensed form, i.e. to detail the definition, calculation,
interpretation, preferred data sources and data availability and quality for each of the
indicators. In a way the Documentation Sheets bind together and summarise the outcomes
of the main activities of the ECHIM project: the conclusions of the Country Reports,
the ECHIM Survey and, to some extent, Bilateral Discussions. The Documentation
Sheets also present the overall guidelines for implementing the ECHI indicators and
provide the necessary basis on which Member States can start work to implement the
indicators. However, they do not address the practicalities of implementation, which
must be separately designed for each country.
As described in earlier chapters, the new ECHIM Products website was developed and
modified, among other things, to contain all this indicator metadata and documentation,
i.e. up-to-date health indicator definitions and source specifications for the European
health indicators.
The ECHI shortlist itself was conceived and finalised in the previous projects, ECHI
and ECHI-2. At the start of ECHIM, the specifications of the shortlist indicators were
not fully formalised, although for most indicators quite precise definitions and preferred
data sources were given in the final report of ECHI-2. For some indicators, though, not
much more than the indicator topic was given.
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