World Health Survey General Information
Implementation: Modular approach
The World Health Survey offers a menu of choices of modules for various components. Each country can choose from these modules or may add additional ones. The modules cover the following:
- Health states of populations: measuring health in multiple domains
- Risk factors (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, pollution) and their association with health states
- Responsiveness of health systems: whether health systems meet the legitimate expectations of people
- Coverage, access and utilization of key health services (e.g. immunization, treatment of childhood illness, STD and HIV/AIDS)
- Health care expenditures: how much households contribute to health care
Choice of Survey Methods
Different methods are available and have already been pretested. Each country will decide what is most practical and cost-effective.
- Household Face-to-Face Surveys: randomly selected houses are contacted and a person from that house is interviewed.
- Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI): surveys are conducted via phone using computerized systems when there is good coverage of the telephone network.
- Computer Assisted Personal Interview (CAPI): computer assisted data collection method for replacing paper-and-pen methods of data collection using a portable personal computer.
How to Participate
The first round of the World Health Survey will begin in 2002 and be completed by December 2002. WHO is inviting the Member States to participate. Every effort will be made to accommodate all applying countries. Governments (Ministers of Health) who are interested in conducting the survey in their country should contact WHO which will provide, as requested:
- standardized, pre-tested survey modules
- technical support on survey implementation
- assistance in analyzing the results
- a forum for discussion on implications for policy
- subsequent capacity building to undertake and analyze routine or intermittent surveys in conjunction with routine health information systems.