Geography of health status – An application of a Population Health Index in the last 20 Years (GeoHealthS)

Main objective:

To evaluate the collective health status of the population in Portugal, considering municipalities, groups of municipalities (NUTSIII), regions and the whole country, through the construction and application of a Population Health Index (PHI).

Specific objectives:

1. Identification and selection of health determinants and indicators that will allow to characterize health status and risk level of population groups under different geographical aggregation levels;

2. Construction of a Population Health Index (PHI) to evaluate, under an integrated and comprehensive model, health determinants, indicators and risk factors, enabling the comparison between different populations and its monitoring through the use of time series data;

3. Application of the PHI to the Portuguese reality, with data at different levels of geographic disaggregation (scales: Municipalities, Health Centres Groups, NUTSII and NUTSIII);

4. PHI longitudinal analysis (1991, 2001 e 2011), at the adopted scales;

5. Apply the PHI for the whole country and, if possible (dependent of availability of relevant data on other countries to feed the model), comparison with other countries (EU, OCDE);

6. Public access to the PHI results and outcomes through the creation of a Webpage;