Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Measuring or Valuing Population Health: Some Conceptual Problems

Measuring or Valuing Population Health: Some Conceptual Problems There is no way literally to measure health, because health is multi-dimensional, and there is no metric whereby one person who is healthier than a second with respect to one dimension but less healthy with respect to another counts as healthier, less healthy or equally healthy overall. Health analysts instead measure how good or bad health states are in some regard. If these values are measures of health states, then identical health states must have identical values. But in different circumstances, the same health state may have different values. It may be better or worse. Uniform values can nevertheless be assigned to kinds of health states, either as a weighted average of the values of their tokens or as the value of the performance in a standard environment of the capacity the health state constitutes. These uniform values are not well suited for some of the purposes for which summary measures of population health have been intended, and a set of non-evaluative indicators may be an attractive alternative. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Health Ethics Oxford University Press

Measuring or Valuing Population Health: Some Conceptual Problems

Hausman, Daniel M.
Public Health Ethics , Volume 5 (3) – Nov 5, 2012
Download PDF
11 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/oxford-university-press/measuring-or-valuing-population-health-some-conceptual-problems-MBPG0w3k4M

References (12)

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Copyright
The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press. Available online at www.phe.oxfordjournals.org
ISSN
1754-9973
eISSN
1754-9981
DOI
10.1093/phe/phs011
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

There is no way literally to measure health, because health is multi-dimensional, and there is no metric whereby one person who is healthier than a second with respect to one dimension but less healthy with respect to another counts as healthier, less healthy or equally healthy overall. Health analysts instead measure how good or bad health states are in some regard. If these values are measures of health states, then identical health states must have identical values. But in different circumstances, the same health state may have different values. It may be better or worse. Uniform values can nevertheless be assigned to kinds of health states, either as a weighted average of the values of their tokens or as the value of the performance in a standard environment of the capacity the health state constitutes. These uniform values are not well suited for some of the purposes for which summary measures of population health have been intended, and a set of non-evaluative indicators may be an attractive alternative.

Journal

Public Health Ethics – Oxford University Press

Published: Nov 5, 2012

There are no references for this article.