World health statistics 2017: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals

Overview

The World Health Statistics series is WHO’s annual compilation of health statistics for its 194 Member States. The series is produced by the WHO Department of Information, Evidence and Research, of the Health Systems and Innovation Cluster, in collaboration with all relevant WHO technical departments.

World Health Statistics 2017 focuses on the health and health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and associated targets by bringing together data on a wide range of relevant SDG indicators. In some cases, as indicator definitions are being refined and baseline data are being collected, proxy indicators are presented. In addition, in the current absence of official goal-level indicators, summary measures of health such as (healthy) life expectancy are used to provide a general assessment of the situation.

World Health Statistics 2017 is organized into three parts. In Part 1, six lines of action are described which WHO is now promoting to help build better systems for health and to achieve the health and health-related SDGs. In Part 2, the status of selected health-related SDG indicators is summarized, at both global and regional level, based on data available as of early 2017. Part 3 then presents a selection of stories that highlight recent successful efforts by countries to improve and protect the health of their populations through one or more of the six lines of action. Annexes A and B present countrylevel estimates for selected health-related SDG indicators.