Chapter 1. Country dashboards
The aim of this chapter is to show a set of key indicators to compare performance across countries in each of the following dimensions:
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Health status
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Risk factors for health
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Quality of care
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Health care resources
For each dimension, a set of 4-5 indicators is presented in the form of country dashboards. The indicators are selected based on their policy relevance, but also on data availability and interpretability. Indicators where coverage is highest are therefore prioritised.
In order to assess comparative performance across countries, each country is classified for every indicator based on how they compare against the income group-specific median. Therefore, countries significantly above/below their respective group will be classified as better/worse than average (▲/▼), with the remaining countries classified as close to the average (⦿). This applies to all indicators, with a caveat for the dashboard on health care resources: given the nature of the indicators presented, whereas they cannot be classified as better or worse performance, the arrows simply imply that the values are significantly higher or lower than the median. The dashboard on quality of care does not split the countries across income groups due to data coverage limitations.
In order to allow for cross-country comparisons of performance, countries are split according to their income group (high income, upper-middle income, lower-middle and low income). The central tendency measures presented, for all indicators and income groups, are medians.
In order to classify countries as “better than”, “close to”, or “worse than” the central tendency of any indicator, a measure of statistical dispersion is needed to compute the reasonable range for values close to the central tendency value, with anything above or below classified accordingly. The preferred measure is the Median Absolute Deviation (MAD), since it is a robust measure that is both more efficient and less biased than a simple standard deviation when outliers are present.
Countries are classified as “better than median” if they lie above the median + 1 MAD, “worse than median” if they lie below the median – 1 MAD, and “close to the median” if they lie within ± 1 MAD from the median.
Health status
The five indicators used to compare health status are life expectancy at birth for males (2016), life expectancy at birth for females (2016), survival to age 65 for males (2016), survival to age 65 for females (2016), and under age 5 mortality rate per 1 000 live births (2016).
Risk factors
The five indicators used to compare risk factors are the age-standardised prevalence estimates for daily tobacco smoking among persons aged 15 and above (2015), recorded alcohol consumption in litres per capita among persons aged 15 and above (2015), the share of population with access to basic sanitation (2015), the share of population with access to basic drinking water (2015) and the prevalence of overweight among adolescent (crude estimates, 2016).
Quality of care
The five indicators used to compare quality of care are the five-year net survival rate for breast cancer, cervical cancer and colon cancer among persons aged 15 and above (2014), and vaccination rates for diphtheria tetanus toxoid and pertussis (DTP3) and measles (MCV) among children aged around 1 (2016).
Health care resources
The four indicators used to compare health care resources are health expenditure per capita in USD international (2015), the share of out-of-pocket spending in total current health spending (2015), the per capita expenditure on pharmaceuticals in USD international (2015) and the number of hospital beds per 1 000 population (2016).