[Organizing public health reports]

Health reporting is one of the more traditional tasks of the public health service (öffentlicher Gesundheitsdienst--OGD) which has witnessed a revival over the past few years. Health reports aim at imparting information on the structure, function and outcome of the health service on a continual basis. Target groups for such reports could be the decision-makers within the health service, as well as those institutions laying the ground for the decisions to be made, and the general public as well. Health reporting is closely linked to the attempts being made at defining targets for use within the health service. It only makes sense to formulate operational targets. The formulation of the targets, however, demands more information, especially on the health status of the population, than is at present available in the Federal Republic of Germany. We differentiate between basic and special reports: basic reports provide us with a very broad spectrum of data-oriented and indicator-oriented information, whereas special reports are more of an in-depth, topic-oriented representation of the information, drawing ad hoc on the data and the indicators. One particular field of activity to be covered by the OGD could turn out to be carrying out smaller-scale comparison studies on disease risks. The OGD could initiate, carry out and even publish these studies by itself, provided that sufficient equipment and staff trained adequately in epidemiology are available. Owing to the methodological problems involved with hot-spot investigations, it is also advisable to have bio-statisticians involved right from the planning stage, since such investigations can be costly and it is therefore not always possible to repeat them at will.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)