18.1. Indices of population health
Human health is formed and maintained by all variety of conditions of everyday life. According to A.E. Ivanova (1996) the assessments of health and quality of life are based on the following parameters:
• Incidence and spread of diseases and deaths (the routine medical indices), which should be reasonably interpreted only in relation to how they reflect the quality of population life;
• The positive indices of health including the shares of physically and psychically (by self-assessment) healthy persons in population, as well as socially problem-free individuals. Auxiliary indices can be the shares of persons 1) included into the health promotion programs, 2) having the normal body weight and height indices, and 3) not applying for medical help, etc. The main problem in using these indices is elaboration of criteria of the norm at local, national, and international levels.
• The indices describing functional capacity of people to solve their vital problems. It is important that these indices are wider and more universal than those ones currently employed in medicine to assess the physiological reserves of human organism.
In a systematic presentation, these indices (the statistical indicators) are given in Table 18.1, which shows evolution of ideology underlying the selection of the health indicators in a broad sense. The downward transition across the cells in this table shows replacement of the classical forms of assessment of public health according to incidence rates and the spread of morbidity and mortality to more complex population social evaluation of these phenomena. By viewing Table 18-1 from left to right, one can see complication of the derived indices in transition from the classical parameters of medical statistics to modern complex assessments.