Health Statistics is a branch of official statistics that is mainly meant to cater to the needs of statisticians, professional and institutional users of official statistics. Apart from administrative data on health related parameters, it also covers measures, estimates and counts derived from survey and census results.
Health statistics are crucial for decision making at all levels of health care systems.
It facilitates better decisions in policy design, health planning, management, monitoring and evaluation of programmes and services including patient care and facilitate improvements in overall health services performance and outcome. Health management information incorporates all the data needed by policy makers, clinicians and health service users to improve and protect population health. Few countries in the world today have effective and comprehensive systems in place to gather this data.
