8th meeting of the Task Force on Health Expectancies

1. 8th meeting of the Task Force on Health Expectancies Session 3 – Improving current HLY estimates The health questions in SILC 2007 and 2008

2. Health variables in SILC • Minimum European Health Module (MEHM): • self-perceived health • longstanding illness or condition • limitation in activities • Unmet need for medical examination or treatment • Main reason for unmet need for medical examination or treatment • Unmet need for dental examination or treatment • Main reason for unmet need for dental examination or treatment

3. Work on the improvement of the comparability • Translation issues reported in relation to the national EU-SILC health questions • Information of the Eurostat Statistics Living Conditions Working Group (in charge of EU-SILC) in June 2007 in order to: • Solve remaining translation problems and harmonise national questionnaires with the EHIS • Ensure a continuous coordination with the EHIS national delegates  Agreement on a full harmonisation from 2008 onwards • Problems with the national EU-SILC health questions still reported in 2009 • Quality assessement of the 2007 and 2008 national EU-SILC health questions launched by Eurostat in August 2009

4. 2009 assessment • National SILC questionnaires available in the public part of Circa • Questionnaires availability: • 26 countries for the 2007 reference year • 23 countries for the 2008 reference year • Assessment questionnaire prepared by Eurostat and sent to the CG/TG HIS members from the countries above • Answers to the Eurostat questionnaire received from 15 countries; for IE, RO and UK assessment done by Eurostat  In some countries corrections are still needed

5. Question on self-perceived health • In most countries, the SILC and EHIS questions are identical • The main difference relates to the translation of the “fair” answer category • Deviation reported in 2007 and 2008 in Belgium for the Flemish version of the questionnaire: the question is about general health and not about health in general

6. Question on the chronic (long-standing) illness or condition • Most of the problems reported (use of different concepts and question wordings) concerns the 2007 reference year • Improvement in 2008 in the wording of the question (CZ, DK, EL, ES). • Deviations reported in : • BE (2007 and 2008) • CZ, DK, ES, NL, RO and UK (2007)

7. Question on the limitations in activities because of health problems • Major deviations: • in 2007, in 2 countries (DK and UK), the question on limitation was filtered by the answers provided to the previous questions. • in 2007, in 6 countries (BG, CZ, DK, ES, SI and UK), the time reference "for at least the past 6 months" was not correctly indicated in the question. This situation didn't change in 2008 in Slovenia. • the following references for the limitation are used: • activities people usually do (BE, CY, IE, IT,LV, SI, CZ_2008, DK_2008, FI_2008, ES_2008 and PT_2007) • own activities (EE_2007, EL, CZ_2007 and DK_2007) • everyday activities (BG, UK, ES_2007, NL_2007, FI_2007 and PT_2008) • usual activities (PL) • ability to work or daily activities (RO) • in Denmark in 2007, the question had only 2 answer categories (yes/no). • in Portugal, more deviations are identified in 2008 than in 2007

8. Conclusions • the national HIS experts are asked to continue the coordination at the national level with the SILC counterparts in order to fully implement the SILC revised guidelines for the health variables • In complement, the Eurostat Public health team will ask the Eurostat SILC team to get in touch with their national delegates.