Eurosurveillance, Volume
16, Issue
3,
20 January 2011
WHO publishes report on health and health inequalities based on data from the Eurostat Labour Force Survey
Eurosurveillance editorial team (
)
1
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently published a report based on data from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union (EU). The report, “What does Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey say about health and health inequalities in the European Union”, is only available online [1].
The publication analyses data made available recently from the Eurostat Labour Force Survey [2] and seeks to measure health and socioeconomic inequalities in health. It includes data from 25 European countries and covers the period 1983-2004.
The report concludes that ‘the Labour Force Survey may add a useful and hitherto unexploited resource for measuring socioeconomic inequalities in health across European countries and over time. Future research should use the Labour Force Survey data to try to identify and measure the drivers of health inequalities in the region’.
The main limitations of the report as stated by the authors are that while they consider the potential of the Labour Force Survey dataset to be of importance, it has limitations from a health perspective because its health information is exclusively related to various dimensions of absence from the workplace due to illness, or to being employed.
References
- Mazzuco S, Suhrcke M (2010). What does Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey say about health and health inequalities in the European Union? Copenhagen, WHO Regional Office for Europe. Available from: http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/130188/e94625.pdf
- Eurostat [web site] (2010). Luxembourg, European Commission. Available from: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/employment_unemployment_lfs/introduction