Below is an extract from a piece of work a colleague is working on. Is
anyone systematically collecting this sort of information? I'll
summarise replies if there is a sufficient response.
George Leahy
Health Economist
"All that is solid, melts into air"
The Problem.
Public Health Information Units often get requests for data on the
prevalence of chronic disease usually in the context of service planning
and sometimes with very short deadlines. Recent requests in ELCHA
concerned Cerebral Palsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes. The best that
can be done usually is to take national or survey based estimates of
rates by age, sex and other relevant characteristics like ethnicity and
apply them to local population estimates. (There is better data for
cancer) Finding data on such rates currently depends on personal
knowledge and/or research which may take significant time and may yield
unreliable answers where expertise is limited. As far as is known there
is no systematic source of information in this area although a good deal
is contained in the Health Care Needs Assessments.
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