Health-reporting in Heidelberg

Based on a City Council decision of 1991, the City of Heidelberg joined the “Healthy Cities” network in Germany. By this decision, the City committed itself to place new emphasis on promoting the health and quality of life of its citizens in politics and administration, in accordance with the 1986 Ottawa Charter of the WHO.

A policy aimed at improving health and the quality of life within a municipality needs adequate and detailed information, plus analyses of the existing health (and other) problems, targets, tasks and target groups – in brief the requirement situation within the city. This task means much more than just collecting data and statistics and making them available. Problem-oriented health-reporting is an important instrument of a local policy oriented at the health of its population and represents the basis for discussions of its stakeholders.
Health-reporting includes examinations, descriptions and analyses of certain subjects and problems, such as the health situation of certain groups within the population or dangers to health caused by working or environmental conditions, documented by means of special reports. Apart from this, health-reporting has to document all health problems within a community by means of overview reports such as the Second Health Report.

The most important task of such a health report is to supply the public and the decision-makers with an overview of the health situation of the population.This includes the following subjects:

• State of health within the population as a whole and of individual groups within population in comparison. Indicators for this are data on: mortality, morbidity, risk factors, frequency of accidents, lifestyles, personal and social resources.
• Main health hazards in the fields of work, environment and social life. Indicators for this are, for example, environment and work strains, deficits and problems within infrastructure, social networks and housing supply as well as unemployment, need of care, poverty, distribution of health-promoting conditions and access to offers and services.
• Organizational structures of services in the health sector. Indicators are the number and distribution of various providers of health services within the city area.

Another important task of health-reporting is to describe, judge and evaluate the effects of the measures so that decisions can be confirmed or changed if necessary. The Second Heidelberg Health Report is concerned particularly with accounting and evaluating.