Planning of municipal health services

Municipalities need to be aware of service needs in order to be able to plan their health services. This calls for municipal health data produced by different data providers across organisation boundaries. A project was implemented that aimed to bring together existing data in a new way so as to make them easily accessible for health service planning. Included are indicators that describe the need for services directly or indirectly:

• Population: indicators on population structure that are linked with service needs
• Health behaviour: indicators that reflect or anticipate service needs
• Morbidity: indicators that describe population health and morbidity
• Service use: indicators that to some extent describe service needs

The indicators are targeted especially at chief physicians and directors of health services in municipalities in order to support service planning and political decision-making. At best, it is possible to make use of the indicators in preparing a "diagnosis" on the need for services in the municipality. They can also be used as an indirect tool for monitoring activities.

The data have been selected and processed by a group that consists of the representatives of

• The Helsinki University Department of Public Health (Outi Elonheimo),
• Statistics Finland (Hilkka Ahonen)
• The Social Insurance Institution (Timo Klaukka)
• The National Public Health Institute (Seppo Koskinen, Satu Helakorpi)
• The Centre for Pharmacotherapy Development (Taina Mäntyranta)
• STAKES (Olli Nylander, Marja Niemi, Hannu Rintanen)
• municipalities (Jukka Mattila from Kotka, Pekka Nikka from Iisalmi)

Additional information:

Tiina Puhakka
(firstname.lastname@stakes.fi)

Nina Knape
(firstname.lastname@stakes.fi)

Outi Elonheimo (firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi)