Health at a Glance 2017

OECD

• Publisher: OECD
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9789264280885
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Chapter 1. Indicator overview: OECD snapshots and country dashboards1

This chapter presents a set of selected indicators on health and health system performance, designed to shed light on how well OECD countries perform along five dimensions: health status, risk factors for health, access to care, quality and outcomes of care, and health care resources. These indicators, taken from the main chapters of the publication, are presented in the form of OECD snapshots and country dashboards. The former illustrates time trends for the OECD as a whole, together with a snapshot of the latest available data (OECD average, top and bottom performers). The dashboards summarise how each country performs on all indicators compared to the OECD average.

The selection of the indicators presented in this chapter was based on policy relevance, data availability and ease of interpretation. The selection and comparison of indicators is meant to capture relative strengths and weaknesses of countries to help identify possible areas for priority action, though not to identify which countries have the best health system overall.

OECD snapshots and country dashboards

Policy makers in OECD countries have a keen interest to understand how well their health systems perform. A look at indicators contained in this publication shows that significant progress has already been achieved. People in OECD countries are living longer than ever before, with life expectancy at birth now exceeding 80 years on average, thanks to improvements in living conditions and educational attainments, but also to healthier lifestyles and progress in health care.

In most countries, universal health coverage provides financial protection against the cost of illness and promotes access to care for the whole population. Quality of care has also generally improved, as shown by the reduction in deaths after heart attacks and strokes, and the earlier detection and improved treatments for diseases such as diabetes and cancer. But these improvements have come at a cost: health spending now accounts for about 9% of GDP on average in OECD countries, and exceeds 10% in many countries. Higher health spending is not necessarily a problem when the benefits exceed the costs, but there is ample evidence of inequities and inefficiencies in health. There is also a need to achieve a better balance between spending on curative care and disease prevention.

Despite these improvements, important questions remain about how successful countries are in achieving good results on different dimensions of health system performance. For example, what are the main factors explaining differences in health status and life expectancy across OECD countries? Is the increase in the prevalence of certain risk factors, such as obesity, offsetting some of the gains from the reduction in other risk factors like smoking? To what extent can citizens benefit from adequate and timely access to care, and good financial protection against the costs of health care? What do we know about the quality and safety of care provided to people for a range of common health conditions? What are the financial, human and technical resources allocated to health systems in different countries?

Answering these questions is by no means an easy task, but the snapshots and dashboards presented in this chapter can help shed light on how well countries do in promoting the health of their population and on several dimensions of health system performance. They do not have the ambition of identifying which countries have the overall best health system; rather, they summarise some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of OECD countries on a selected set of indicators of health and health system performance. They can be useful to identify areas for priority action, but should be complemented by a more in-depth review of the data and factors influencing cross-country variations, presented in the main chapters of this publication.

This chapter presents five sets of indicators, which are discussed in full in the chapters in parentheses, highlighting how well countries fare in each of the following dimensions:

• Health status (Chapters 3 and 11)
• Risk factors for health (Chapter 4)
• Access to care (Chapter 5)
• Quality of care (Chapter 6)
• Health care resources (Chapters 7, Chapter 8 and 9)

For each of these dimensions, a set of 4-5 relevant indicators is presented in the form of OECD snapshots and country dashboards. These indicators are selected from the publication based on their policy relevance and importance as key factors to monitor in a health system, but also on data availability and interpretability. Therefore, indicators for which country coverage is highest are prioritised to improve comparability.

OECD snapshots, newly introduced, provide summary statistics for key indicators in the five dimensions listed above. They complement the country dashboards by visualising:

• the latest OECD average (for quick comparison with country figures in the dashboards)
• the distribution of top and bottom values (for a general sense of the dispersion surrounding each indicator)
• the overall OECD trend since 2005 (to highlight changes over time)

The snapshots complement the country dashboards, helping the reader make a first assessment of a country’s performance vis-à-vis the OECD average and value range before delving into the more detailed indicator chapters of the publication.

Country dashboards, in the form of summary tables, compare a country’s performance to one another and the OECD average. Countries are classified for each indicator into three colour-coded groups:

• Blue, when the country’s performance is within close distance of the OECD average
• Green, when the country’s performance is considerably better than the OECD average
• Red, when the country’s performance is considerably worse than the OECD average

The only exception to this grouping is for the dashboard on health care resources (Table 1.5), where the indicators presented cannot be strictly classified as better or worse performance. For this reason, the colour coding in this dashboard uses a lighter and darker shade of blue to signal that a country is considerably below or above the OECD average. Values for each indicator are shown for all countries and for the OECD as a whole.

Methodology, interpretation and use

OECD snapshots

For each indicator, the OECD average, highest and lowest values for the latest available year are shown, corresponding to the data presented in the main chapters of ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Legal and rights
• Foreword
• Executive summary
• Reader’s guide
• Chapter 1. Indicator overview: OECD snapshots and country dashboards
• Chapter 2. What has driven life expectancy gains in recent decades? A cross-country analysis of OECD member states
• Chapter 3. Health status
• Chapter 4. Risk factors for health
• Chapter 5. Access to care
• Chapter 6. Quality and outcomes of care
• Chapter 7. Health expenditure
• Chapter 8. Health workforce
• Chapter 9. Health care activities
• Chapter 10. Pharmaceutical sector
• Chapter 11. Ageing and long-term care
• About the OECD