Skills building seminar: Population health monitoring goes upstream to improve the uptake of the wider health determinants
Authors:   Organised by: EUPHA (PHMR), EUPHA (URB) Chair persons: Nicole Rosenkötter - EUPHA (PHMR), Claudia Costa - Portugal
Published: November 2019

Population health monitoring and reporting provides regular and up to date information on health outcomes, health behaviour, and parameters related to health care. If relevant and possible, information is stratified by sex, age and socio-economic indicators. Finally, the outputs of routine population health monitoring and reporting aim to inform policy makers and other stakeholders to develop healthy public policies and implement health promoting actions.

However, does the processed data and information really help us to develop a strong and effective narrative on how to improve population health? Alternatively, this information might perpetuate a focus on health care and individualistic solutions for health and inhibits us to frame a narrative focussed on the social, political, and commercial determinants of health.

If we (1) aim to follow a Health in All Policies approach, (2) agree that changes in population health can best be reached if health determinants are tackled upstream, and (3) acknowledge that health is mainly determined outside the health sector, we probably miss parts of the picture with our current routine population health monitoring and reporting activities.

In this workshop, we aim to explore data and information sources that have the potential to expand our general monitoring and reporting focus. The first presentation will focus on the living environment and provides an overview on geospatial information like land use, road and rail networks, amenities, and air pollution, available online at EU level. The second presentation puts the focus on health promoting processes within Finnish municipalities. The tool, that follows a Health in All Policies approach, has emerged to a resource that collects and presents this information routinely. The third presentation will discuss methods for involving the community in making decisions about measuring what is important for their own health and wellbeing. It will also discuss taking their ideas forward and identifying validated tools that can be used to measure what the community want. The last presentation highlights the relevance of policy analysis, for example in the area of food and nutrition, and underlines how this analytical approach can be used to communicate actions needed upstream.

Experts from public health authorities and universities are invited to discuss during this skills building seminar how the focus on the wider health determinants and upstream prevention can be strengthened in routine population health monitoring and reporting. The presentations are followed by an interactive part of 30 minutes to discuss the applicability of the presented approaches and further possibilities to broaden the scope of population health monitoring and reporting.

Key messages

The data and information usually used for population health monitoring and reporting lacks information necessary to promote a Health in All Policies perspective and to push upstream prevention. To frame narratives that underline the importance of the social, political and commercial determinants of health, we need to expand our data and information sources and include policy analysis.