Dare to compare! Benchmarking Dutch health with the European community health indicators (ECHI)

How does public health in the Netherlands compare to public health in other European Union (EU) countries? Are we among the top five or lagging behind? Does the picture change when focusing on specific subjects? This report compares the Netherlands to EU countries along a set of more than eighty European health indicators on, for example, diseases, lifestyle and prevention.

This is the first time that the indicators that make up the so-called ECHI (European Community Health Indicator) shortlist are used for benchmarking Dutch public health. This shortlist has been adopted by the EU to assist health policy makers in identifying common challenges, priorities and opportunities, and to learn from other countries' experiences.

The systematic benchmark approach also provides a detailed view on the actual availability, comparability and quality of data sets, both within the Netherlands and throughout the EU. It becomes apparent that EU-funded projects and Eurostat activities increasingly contribute to better data quality and more valid comparisons, but much work is still to be done.

Given the ambition of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport to get the Netherlands back into the top five of the healthiest European countries, a benchmark is a good exercise to identify possibilities for improvement and issues that require policy attention.

This report was commissioned by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport.