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The European Health Risk Monitoring (EHRM) Project (1) is part of the European Commission's (EC) Health Monitoring Programme (HMP) (2). The EHRM Project has prepared recommendations for the EC on indicators for major chronic disease risk factors and on international collaboration needed for collecting the data through surveys. The Project has also prepared a survey protocol and operational guidelines for the data collection (3).
One of the tasks for the EHRM Project, specified in the project proposal, was analysing the existing data to be applied in the EU health monitoring database. An important part of such existing data was the international WHO MONICA data set, which was readily available in the EHRM coordinating centre. The European Commission had a separate activity ongoing for the technical implementation of the EU database through which the structured health information would be disseminated (4). The plan of the EHRM Project was to collaborate with the developers of the EU health monitoring database. When it became apparent that the technical development of the EU database will not reach the stage, were it could usefully collaborate with producers of the data, the task specified for the EHRM project was modified accordingly. The two parts of the modified task were (a) to apply the indicators suggested by the Project (3) to the existing WHO MONICA data set to test that the suggested indicators are logical and their implementation works technically, and (b) to develop principles for the contents of the reports of the information.
This document deals with the principles of the contents of the routine reporting of the health monitoring information. It focuses on the ways of reporting the data for different target groups, and on the type of information that needs to accompany the actual data. It does not address the list of health issues that should be reported nor the technical aspects of reporting. The document gives the current view of the authors, based on their earlier experience in reporting and work with the users of such data. It was inspired by a number of recent conferences on health and health behaviour monitoring and the discussions in the HMP project coordinators' meeting. The focus of the document was largely determined by issues on which there was not necessarily a common understanding within the HMP.
Hypertension and related aspects, and data from the Finnish health risk monitoring are used in the examples. The Finnish data was used because it was most easily available to the authors.
The European Community Health Indicators (ECHI) Project (5) has compiled a list of health indicators to be monitored in the Member States. The ECHI Project has also outlined reporting practices, and have created the concept of "user-windows". Their focus has been on ways of building user-windows for the different needs of the EC. They have defined different reporting levels by suitable grouping of indicators for different user groups. We are separating different user groups, in the EU-level and nationally, from the point of view of the level of detail of the information that should be reported. Therefore this report is complementary to the user-window discussion of the ECHI Project.
This document has not been discussed widely among the participants of the EHRM Project. It aims to give one point of view to the discussion on reporting. It is recognized that the reporting will, or at least should, be a dialogue between the reporters and those who need the data, and therefore the forms and contents of reporting are expected to develop continually from year to year and for different uses of the data.
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