Health Conditions

Abstract

A healthy population is key to the quality of a society. In order to know the health situation of a population multiple and very different tools have been developed, many of them designed from a clinical and epidemiological perspective oriented toward diagnosing individuals’ state of health. However, composite measures developed from a social perspective and focused on evaluating and monitoring the health of the European population are limited. In this chapter, we present the most important and recent indices aimed at measuring the health conditions of European societies: Euro Health Consumer Index, Health Measures, Objective and Subjective Health Indicators, Global Food Security Index, and summary measures of health such as Healthy Life Years. For every index, different sections offer basic information about its conceptual and empirical framework, its process of construction and metrics together with the most recent available data.