Regional typology
Work package 6 will develop a typology of European regions according to demographic, socioeconomic and health related indicators. The typology will help to study health inequalities in Europe at the regional level. It will permit to classify territories according to their determinants for health and according to their health profile.
The typology will describe regions with similar health profile throughout Europe and it will enable regions to select appropriate regions for benchmarking analyses and for comparisons and cooperation projects.
Based on previous experiences on building typology of regions in order to describe health inequities, three main categories of data will be included in the typology : socio economic and demographic indicators (population density, population aged under 20 or over 75, unemployment rate, …), indicators describing the health status of the population (general mortality rate, premature mortality, specific mortality, specific morbidity, …), indicators describing health services (number of physicians, nurses, long stay beds, nursing homes, …).
The project presented does not take in account the cultural and political context for two reasons: (i) it is difficult to gather available and comparable data and indicators describing the cultural and political context of each region of the EU which could be included in the profiles and typology, (ii) a qualitative analysis of the influence of the health system on the inequalities could be undertaken but would be an large project for itself and cannot be included in the present project.
The tasks of this WP will be :
* Literature search to select variables which are important as determinants of health status of a population and as determinant for success of health programmes and policies and on methodology on typology;
* Perform a statistical analysis, including multivariate calculations to check the correlations between the data and to select the final set if indicators which will be used for the typology;
* Present the result of the calculations to the regions and the national representatives to check plausibility of the results and to interpret its. For this part of the work package, an intermediate meeting will be organised with a member from each European country. This meeting will also allow to make a point on the advancement of the other work packages;
* Include the results of the consultation of the regions into the analysis (which may be a recalculation with some new or changed data);
* Include the results of the analyses in the regional health profiles;
* Write a final report with the description of the work and the final results, taking into account the comments of the regions.
Result of the regional typology will be soon available.