INDICATORS

Jürgen Thelen, Ari-Pekka Sihvonen, Antti Tuomi-Nikula
4. AVAILABILITY OF ECHI INDICATORS
4.1. Identifying the international data sources
One of the main objectives of the ECHIM project was to assess the availability and
comparability of the ECHI shortlist indicators in the EU Member States, Candidate
Countries and EEA/EFTA countries. This was considered necessary because until the
launch of the ECHIM project, information about the actual availability of the proposed
ECHI shortlist indicators was incomplete and outdated. For this reason it was decided
to compile “Country Reports” using the data already available for the ECHI shortlist
indicators. For organisational reasons, the ECHI shortlist indicators were initially
divided into three sections. The first section contained the indicators that had previously
been assessed as regularly available and comparable. The second section contained those
indicators where data availability and comparability was assessed as limited. The third
section consisted of those indicators that had been assessed as not available or not
comparable. In addition, there was the list of indicators, which had been proposed by
projects and Working Parties after the ECHI shortlist indicators had been selected.
Because the data for the different indicators were not available in a single database, it
was decided to use all major international databases for the availability check. Many
of the ECHI shortlist indicators were provided by more than one database. For those
indicators the data from the different databases were compiled into one Excel file in
order to give the national contact persons an overview of the data their country provides
for the various international organisations.
In addition to the data retrieved from international databases, project-based databases
were included in the review. This was felt appropriate as several projects that dealt with
the development of health indicators under the DG SANCO Public Health Programme
had established topic-specific databases. These databases normally covered indicator sets
for theme-specific purposes, e.g. the monitoring of mental health (MINDFUL project)
or environmental health (ENHIS project), and contained data from pilot data collections
under these projects. It is important to account for the fact that the future development
of these databases is currently unclear. For this reason, indicator data contained in these
databases was only presented if there was no other data source. Usually these project
databases were designed as comprehensive “user windows” that contained indicators
from both the ECHI shortlist and the longlist.
48