What are Environmental Health Indicators?
Saturday 4th February 2012
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What are Environmental Health Indicators?
The Environmental Health Indicators (EHIs) project is commissioned by the Ministry of Health to develop a functional core set of environmental health indicators [EHIs] for New Zealand. EHI’s are measures that summarise the relationship between the environment and health.Their main functions include: -
- Tools to monitor changes in the environment and health
- Enable surveillance of status or trends of public health events associated with environmental exposures
- Provide information to decision makers in order to identify needs & actions both in the environment and in health
- Provide objective baseline information for developing targets
- Demonstrate spatial and temporal variations
- Monitoring effectiveness of policy actions
- Promoting specific policy issues
The next stage was a feasibility study, which assessed the availability, quality and usefulness of each indicator. The findings of this study suggest that there is a wealth of environmental health data being collected in New Zealand by a myriad of organisations. Hence, no new monitoring systems need to be developed. However, there needs to be a more concerted effort at extracting the relevant data from existing systems and transforming it to summarised, accessible information for environmental health decision making.
There are many benefits to be gained from the establishment of an environmental health indicator system (EHIS), including the ability to benchmark internationally and promote multi-agency networking to facilitate data exchange. The EHIS can provide an integrated assessment of progress on selected issues relevant to sustainable development, especially in the context of human health. Areas of greater relative need, can be identified objectively using EHI’s in order to facilitate the setting of EH policy priorities. The indicators can form an integral part of a wider environmental health information system which would incorporate monitoring and surveillance data with information, communication and decision making tools to enable evidence based decision making. Data systems cannot replace policies and actions directly aimed at improving environmental health conditions but they could nonetheless form an intrinsic part of the decision making process at early stages.
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Project Synopsis
Scoping study (2001)Assessed various environmental health frameworks and approaches to indicator development and decided on the DPSEEA framework and WHO - Europe model as a good starting point (Report 1).
Feasibility study (2002)
Assessed the WHO indicator set in terms of availability, quality and utility in the NZ context (Report 2).
Pilot study (2003)
Trialled the collection, collation and analysis of data for the proposed air and water indicator datasets in the Auckland and Marlborough regions (Report 3).
National Roll Out (2004)
Extension of air, water, traffic and radiation indicators nationally (Report 4).
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