The objective was to identify and select indicators to assess the impact on health of the social context and the latest economic recession in Spain and its regions. The proposals for improvements that emerged during this work may be useful to increase the quality of the statistical processes and products from key sources that use official statistics.

1. This project is being developed by members of the Biomedical
Research Networking Centre on Public Health and Epidemiology.
Our main goal
is,
to
provide
indicators
to
assess
the
impact
of
the
social
context
and
the
latest
economic
recession,
on
health,
in
Spain
and
its
regions.

2. This figure depicts the whole process we followed to achieve our
goal.
Following the Spanish conceptual framework of the social
inequality determinants in health, we identified indicators
sequentially from key documents, Web of Science, and from
organizations that produce official statistics.
The information gathered resulted in a large directory of
indicators…

3. that was reviewed by an expert panel.
We then selected a set of indicators according to geographic and
temporal criteria.
Finally, we created a database for the selected contextual
indicators.

4. So, to date, we have identified more than 200 contextual indicators
related to social determinants of health.
The Spanish Statistics Institute provided the main information
sources for the selected indicators.
This table shows what the directory of indicators is like. Each row is
an indicator and each column gathers information about this
indicator.
Only half of the identified indicators satisfied the selection criteria.

5. So, we managed to produce this database with all the selected
indicators, over 100, in only one file.
Each row contains the data for the indicators for a specific year,
gender and region.
For example, the data for ID3, for 2007, for both sexes and for
Andalusia, is sixty-seven point eight nine.
The ID label, and other information about the indicator, is available
on the directory. In this case, ID3 is the unemployment rate.
Both, the directory of indicators and the database, will be available
online in the near future.

6. Finally, during the identification and selection of indicators and
data, we detected various areas in need of improvement. To give
some examples:
- There is still a need to create more indicators on some areas of
the SDH (e.g. psychosocial factors or ethnic minorities).
- It is also vital to have both more accurate and more data on
regions.
- To identify indicators on SDH, it would be very useful, for
example, if the organizations which produce official statistics,
published the indicators and the data of users’ most frequent
requests.

7. Some more examples:
- Related to the interactivity between sources, a lot of users’ time
would be saved, if direct links to the tables for the data requests
were provided (e.g. the bookmarks provided by Eurostat).
- Finally, answering the users’ data requests, is perhaps the most
important factor in generating trust among users. For example, in
our study, 26% of our requests received no reply; e.g. requests
related to the Spanish Health System, or the Ministry of Education).