Measuring Health: Lessons for Ontario

Planning and evaluating any health care program is a formidable task: how do you measure the health of a population? This fundamental question has been approached from various perspectives in medical, administrative, and economic studies. This book provides a guide to health measurement literature and relates it to Ontario's current and prospective policy choices and to the federal context of health indicators and indices to existing statistics in Ontario in a county-by-county survey of the province's health care. He also outlines the kinds of information essential to health assessment but not currently available.

The book as a whole emphasizes the importance of health care measurement in the humane and efficient planning of health services. It will be of interest to all concerned with the practice of medicine in the 1980s and the planning of health services at the federal and provincial levels, as well as to those with a special interest in health from the economic, political, and sociological perspectives.

Anthony J. Culyer is a professor at the University of York in the Department of Economics and Related Studies.