Background: Health Examination Surveys (HESs) can provide essential information on the health and health determinants of a population, which is not available from other data sources. Nevertheless, only some European countries have systems of national HESs. A study conducted in 2006–2008 concluded that it is feasible to organize national HESs using standardized measurement procedures in nearly a...

BACKGROUND Preventing tobacco use is a key aspect of health promotion during adolescence. We assessed prevalence and impact of school-based tobacco prevention programs in 43 countries. METHODS We performed a secondary analysis of national data of students aged 13-15 years (Global Youth Tobacco Surveys) from 43 countries during 2005-2011. National surveys of the corresponding school personnel ...

OBJECTIVE To identify key data sources of health information and describe their availability in countries of the World Health Organization (WHO) African Region. METHODS An analytical review on the availability and quality of health information data sources in countries; from experience, observations, literature and contributions from countries. SETTING Forty-six Member States of the WHO Afr...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Accreditation requirements mandate that family medicine residency programs perform surveys of graduates. As part of the Preparing the Personal Physician for Practice (P4) Project, we developed a model for a standardized national graduate survey to be used to assess practice characteristics of graduates, including the implementation of features of the Patient-centered M...

BACKGROUND A small but growing body of research indicates that progress in reducing child malnutrition is substantially uneven from place to place, even down to the district level within countries. Yet child malnutrition prevalence and trend estimates available for public health planning are mostly available only at the level of global regions and/or at country level. To support carefully targe...

BACKGROUND Abuse of harmful legal products that can be inhaled or ingested is a serious and growing problem in many rural Alaskan communities, and particularly so among preteens. METHODS This study analyses data collected during baseline measurements of a 5-year NIH/NIDA-funded study entitled A Community Trial to Prevent Youth's Abuse of Harmful Legal Products in Alaska. Youth in 8 communitie...

BACKGROUND A common issue in descriptive injury epidemiology is that in order to calculate injury rates that account for the time spent in an activity, both injury cases and exposure time of specific activities need to be collected. In reality, few national surveys have this capacity. To address this issue, we combined statistics from two different national complex surveys as inputs for the num...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate HIV seroprevalence estimates from demographic and health surveys (DHS) and AIDS indicator surveys (AIS) for potential bias because of non-response and exclusion of non-household population groups. METHODS Data are from 14 DHS/AIS surveys with HIV testing, conducted during 2003-6. Blood samples were collected and analysed for HIV using standard laboratory and quality con...

BACKGROUND National data on dementia prevalence are not always available, yet it may be possible to obtain estimates from large surveys that include dementia screening instruments. In Australia, many of the dementia prevalence estimates are based on European data collected between 15 and 50 years ago. We derived population-based estimates of probable dementia and possible cognitive impairment i...

OBJECTIVE To study geographical patterns of underweight children in Africa by combining information on prevalence with headcounts at a subnational level. METHODS We used large-scale, nationally representative nutrition surveys, in particular the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, which have been designed, analysed and presented according to largely simi...