Candidate Indicators to Monitor the Impact of the Recession on Public Health: Rapid Scoping Study

To date there have been few efforts to investigate the impact of the current recession on the health of the population through the exploitation of routine official sources of information. One reason for this may be the fact that official statistics on population health and health care utilisation take a significant amount of time to validate, this making them less sensitive as timely indicators of change. Yet there are some sources whose release is timely and which offer potential data to systematically assess the effects of the recession on the health of the population. This report is exploratory in attempting to identify such candidate indicators. Further work is required through consultation and peer review processes to establish more precisely whether these indicators can be populated with routine health data.