Regions in the European Union (EU) are becoming an increasingly important political and administrative level. In the field of health monitoring, the exchange of health indicators at the regional level across Europe would allow health professionals and decision-makers to put the characteristics of their own area in the wider context of all other regions across the EU.

Within the framework of the Health Monitoring Programme from the European Commission, the Fédération Nationale des Observatoires Régionaux de Santé (FNORS) has undertaken a project entitled “Health Indicators in the European Regions” (or ISARE - “Indicateurs de Santé dans les Régions d’Europe).

Its aims are to identify for each country the most appropriate sub-national level for exchange of health indicators within the EU (thereafter referred to as “health regions”), and to assess the extent of data availability at these levels.

Existing literature on health care systems and local democracy, and contacts with representatives from each EU member states were used in order to identify the “health regions”.

The availability of a set of key data at regional level was explored by means of a questionnaire based on the framework of the European Community Health Indicators project (or ECHI project, also part of the HMP).

Download report here.

ISARE 2 project

Within the frame of the community action programme for health monitoring (HMP, Health Monitoring Program), the objective of this second phase of the project is to test the feasibility of gathering data at the infra-national levels defined in each of the countries of the European Union⁽¹⁾.

The five specific objectives are:

  Selecting the data to be collected on the basis of their availability provided by the ISARE I project.

  Performing two distinct collection processes : the collection of a limited number of data for all the regions of the participating countries, the collection of a broader range of data for only one region in the participating countries.

  Calculating indicators derived from the collected data.

  Analysing the comparability between regions of the same country. The two collections contains the data sources information and elements allowing a judgment about their comparability. The comparability analyse will be also based on the work conducted by the HMP.

  Creating an experimental internet database to illustrate the interest of the work.

This project was conducted in three phases:

Definition of the information to gather and elaboration of the data "questionnaire".

Creation of the database. Analysis of comparability problems.

Recommendations for the integration of regional data in the European database.

Download report here.

Download appendix here.

1. Denmark did not wish to participate in this phase.

Projet ISARE III

The presentations of April the 19 and 20 are available here.

Download report here.