Inevitably, this will underestimate the distribution of health expectancy. The more refined the groupings are, the more we will approximate the true underlying distribution. Small-area analyses hold out the promise of being one of the most refined methods for revealing the underlying distribution of health expectancy in a population. Non-Fatal Health Outcomes. Measurement of non-fatal health outcomes on continuous or polychotomous scales provides more information from which to estimate the distribution of risk across individuals.
Numerous surveys provide information on self-reported health status using a variety of instruments.
The main problem to date with this information is the comparability of the responses across different cultures, levels of educational attainment, and incomes. For example, the rich often report worse non-fatal health outcomes than the poor. Problems of comparability must be resolved before such data sets can be used to contribute to estimation of health expectancy in the population. For the WHO, the way forward will be to simultaneously pursue the development of methods and data sets to measure these different dimensions of the distribution of health expectancy. We recognize that there is a great need for new methods to integrate these different measurements into one estimation of the distribution of health expectancy in populations.