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The European Union has launched a Programme of Community Action on Health Monitoring, with its objective to contribute to the establishment of a community health monitoring system which makes it possible to:
"(a) measure health status, trends and determinants throughout the community;
(b) facilitate the planning, monitoring and evaluation of community programmes and action; and
(c) provide member states with appropriate health information for comparisons and support of national health policies." (1)
For the implementation of the Programme, the required actions are specified as three pillars (A, B, and C), For pillar A, the EC document states "The objective of the actions in this stage is to establish comparable Community health indicators by means of a critical review of existing health data and indicators, by developing methodologies for obtaining comparable health data and common indicators, and by developing appropriate methods for the collection of the progressively comparable health data needed for these indicators." (2)
The European Health Risk Monitoring (EHRM) project aims to contribute to the Programme of Community Action on Health Monitoring by planning indicators and measures for coordinated, standardized national population risk factor surveys. Such surveys will gather information on major chronic disease risk factors, related behaviours, and determinants, in order to serve and evaluate disease prevention and health promotion efforts in individual countries and on the European level.
The purpose of this document is to critically review previous risk factor surveys and assess comparability of methods and indicators used for the reporting of survey results. The main emphasis will be on the major cardiovascular risk factors, i.e. smoking, blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and body weight, that are also relevant for other chronic diseases. In addition, the review will focus on a number of other factors that are considered important for population based risk factor surveys. These include HDL cholesterol, waist and hip circumferences, blood triglycerides, and blood glucose, relevant to the so called metabolic syndrome, as well as serum cotinine and expired air carbon monoxide, which are important for validating smoking questionnaire data and for assessing passive smoking.
Socio-economic factors, use of medications and alcohol, medical history, diet and physical activity, are all important for the interpretation of risk factor surveys and will be assessed in separate projects of the Programme.
References
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