INDICATORS

The last questions were about the respondents’ initial ideas of implementing the ECHI
system in their countries, and their suggestions or comments on the ECHI indicator
list. These questions served as an introduction to the Bilateral Discussions, in which the
same topics were considered more deeply. These issues are the focus of Chapter 5.4.
5.3. Comparing Country Reports and ECHIM Survey results
As far as indicator data were concerned, the purpose of the ECHIM Survey was to
deepen the information provided by the Country Reports. The Country Reports simply
reviewed the availability of national indicator data in international data sources. The
ECHIM Survey examined the original national data sources. An important added value
of the survey was that it revealed origins and clarified data quality for many indicators,
for which metadata in the international data sources were sometimes quite vague. It
was equally important to discover that much data are available nationally that are not
available in international data sources.
In connection with replying to the ECHIM Survey, the contact persons were also asked
to check the information of their Country Reports. In most cases the figures were correct,
but some inaccuracies were also reported. These were isolated cases, though, and may be
explained by typing errors when entering data in the databases. Also the use of different
data calculation methods and different standard populations in age-standardisation may
have had an impact on the figures.
When it comes to data quality, there were much more alarming cases where the
information gained by the ECHIM Survey made the information in the Country
Reports seem very questionable. According to the Country Report, one country was
ranked high by data availability (data available for 79% of ECHI shortlist indicators).
However, the ECHIM Survey and the related Bilateral Discussion revealed that there
are in fact very little register data available in that country. Majority of the data are based
on very rough estimates based on small, often unreliable samples.
Many of the contact persons pointed out that the necessary data would be available even
though they were missing from the international databases. These cases were mainly
breaks in time series, though. A more important issue is that for many ECHI shortlist
indicators, there are no datasets in the databases of Eurostat, WHO or OECD. This
cannot always be explained by data availability, since for some of these indicators the
data would be available at country level in almost all the surveyed countries. Clear
examples include asthma, high blood pressure and social support. A feature shared in
common by all these indicators is that there is a wide variety of optional acceptable
definitions, a fact that may have halted their implementation in the databases.
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