International cooperation in heath statistics
The extent and the importance of international cooperation in the field of health statistics continuously grows with regard to membership of the Czech Republic in EU.
The long-term cooperation with World Health Organization (WHO) continues on two levels, with the Regional office in Copenhagen (WHO/EURO) and with the Headquarters in Geneva (WHO HQ). One of the main tasks is regular provision of statistical data from the Czech Republic to the extensive database of health indicators in the programme “Health for All“, specified after 2000 as “21 targets for the 21st century“. Also the traditional development and maintenance of the presentation programme of health indicators (DPS) will continue. The current list of DPS indicators is supplemented and adjusted according to demand. New indicators will also be added to the Dynamic tables placed in the web pages of IHIS CR in section Applications.
A considerable volume of work was devoted to the ICD-10 revision, preparation of the updated 2nd edition with updates till 2010 in all three volumes – the Tabular list, Instruction manual and the Alphabet list. It was connected with subsequent updating of the numerical codes, names of diagnoses and validation tools.
Data on hospitalisation are provided annually to „European Hospital Morbidity Database“ (HMDB) of WHO/EURO and to the HFA (Health for All) database. WHO/EURO in the field of statistics of tuberculosis will continue in collaboration with National TB Control Unit of the CR.
Cooperation with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is focused on supplying data to the database OECD Health Data, which accents the economic aspects of health care. Of the other current activities we may mention cooperation in preparation of indicators of health care quality (HCQI) and indicators of long-term care (LTC) and in preparation of the publication Health at a Glance.
Cooperation with European Union grows in intensity, it will be necessary to provide regularly required data to EU databases and to participate actively in the development of health statistics in EU countries. By the end of 2008, European Parliament and Council adopted Regulation no. 1338/2008 of 16. 12. 2008 on Community statistics in the field of public health and security and health protection at work. European Parliament and Council thus adopted a key and principal regulation that significantly affected the tasks of the Institute in the following years. This Regulation defines a general legislative framework for health statistics in EU framework and in five annexes specifies the categories of required information:
- health status and health determinants (EHIS morbidity),
- health care (facilities, resources and capacity, their exploitation, economics),
- causes of death (death certificates, coding of causes),
- work injuries,
- occupational diseases and other work related health problems.
In the field of health statistics, the Institute cooperates particularly with DG Sanco, DG Employment and with Eurostat. Specific feature of data provided to EU is their processing on the level NUTS2, i.e. for the 8 statistical regions of the CR.
A positive feature is the present effort to coordinate activities and cooperation of EU, OECD and WHO in order to avoid excessive or duplicating burden of individual countries in providing health data and information. In the framework of such cooperation the coordinated data collection will continue, concerning expenditure on health according to methodology of SHA (System of Health Accounts) and coordinated data collection will start in non-financial data in the field of heath care. Further work on unification of definitions in various fields of health statistics will also continue.
The Institute participates in the presently performed revision of the methodology of the System of health accounts coordinated by OECD, Eurostat and WHO; in cooperation with Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) the Institute participates in development of the system of monitoring and reporting of data on expenditure on health according to SHA in the CR.
Regular annual processing is performed of data on congenital malformations destined for the International Clearinghouse for Birth Defects Monitoring Systems, data are provided to UNICEF through the agency of CZSO. The Institute further uses documents of IARC, IACR and ENCR for the National cancer registry, regularly updates data for the IACR database and participates in a number of international projects concerning the problems of malignant neoplasms.