Sullivan D F
Vital Health Stat 2. 1971 Jul(42):1-40.
Health programs and activities today include a great variety of public and private efforts directed toward both fatal and nonfatal conditions. Most accepted summary measures of a population's health status, on the other hand, are based on death rates alone. They tell little about the health of the living and therefore provide an in-adequate basis for assessing the need for and success of many health measures. Consequently there has been considerable interest in recent decades in the development of summary indexes of health that reflect information on the living population as well as on the level of mortality. A previous report in this series examined the problem of determining what va ~iables might be used in constructing such measures. The re-port emphasized the need to devise indexes suited to specific objectives of measurement, and it focused on the limited goal of developing a more comprehensive index of changing health status for the United States as a whole. For that purpose a single index based on both mortality and morbidity rates was identified as a potentially useful device.
如今的健康项目和活动包括针对致命和非致命疾病状况的大量公共和私人努力。另一方面，大多数被广泛接受的衡量人群健康状况的汇总指标仅基于死亡率。它们几乎无法说明在世者的健康状况，因此为评估许多健康措施的需求和成效提供了不充分的依据。因此，近几十年来，人们对开发反映在世人群信息以及死亡率水平的健康汇总指标产生了浓厚兴趣。本系列的上一份报告探讨了确定哪些变量可用于构建此类指标的问题。该报告强调需要设计适合特定测量目标的指标，并专注于为整个美国开发一个更全面的健康状况变化综合指标这一有限目标。为此，一个基于死亡率和发病率的单一指标被确定为一种可能有用的工具。
