Social indicators and health-for-all

It is proposed that concepts and results emerging in the 15 year history of the social indicators movement can contribute to the design and implementation of the information systems that will be required if primary health care is to be extended to all people by the year 2000. an ambitious goal set by a recent international conference. Six methodological themes are identified and discussed. These stress the importance of: (1) including normative outcome measures among the indicators. (2) tapping both objective health conditions and subjective perceptions. (3) incorporating theoretical models of how the health care system works. (4) organizing results in a set of health ‘accounts’ which have certain pre-specified relationships to one another, (5) describing key health phenomena at several different levels of specificity and (6) devoting substantial attention to evaluating and improving data quality. These six themes can be used both as guiding principles to shape the development of health information systems and as criteria for evaluating such systems.