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Warsaw 2009: Presentations and short courses

Striving for the best of both worlds: integrating EHIS questions in the Belgian Health Survey

Session: Health Surveys in Europe

Author:

Stefaan Demarest; Scientific Institute of Public Health, Belgium

Abstract:

National health interview surveys organized throughout the European countries provide a treasury of information on the health status, the lifestyle characteristics and the medical consumption of their populations. Unfortunately, up till now the international comparability in this domain was rather restricted due to differences in the wording of the questions, in the mode of data collection and in the sample design.

Since 2002, DG SANCO and EUROSTAT have taken different initiatives to implement a European Health Survey System (EHSS) including the development and implementation of the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS). The EHIS aims at measuring the health status, life style (health determinants) and health care services use of the EU citizens in a harmonized and highly comparable way. It is important to stress that the EHIS is not conceived as a new, separate survey but as a standardized tool intended to be integrated in national surveys. It goes without saying that this integration can jeopardize the comparability of the results with the previous national surveys, due to changes in the wording of the questions, the reference periods,... As a result, one of the major goals of (national) surveys – monitoring trends in health, lifestyle and medical consumption – is under siege. On the other side, one of the main advantages of the EHIS is to allow making comparison between the EU member states and publishing results at the EU level.

Although the integration of EHIS will become compulsory in 2013, it was decided already to implement (parts of) EHIS into the Belgian 2008 survey. The paper describes the problems related to this implementation and how they were dealt with. Based on a pretest – executed in 2007 – in which both the current Belgian questions and the similar EHIS questions were used – ‘evidence based’ decisions could be taken for the development of the 2008 survey in Belgium. Yet, provisional results of this survey show that still decisive steps must still be taken for a full integration of the EHIS.