Good health is essential for people to flourish as citizens, family members, workers and consumers. Aided by technological advances, health systems are of crucial importance in promoting good health and in curing, or mitigating, the consequences of disease. The benefits that modern health systems provide cannot be achieved without cost. Health expenditure has been absorbing an increasing proportion of national income and health systems now represent the largest service industry in many OECD countries. There is much interest among policy makers in scrutinizing variations in the growth, efficiency and equity of health systems. In particular, there is a growing demand for evidence that can be derived for health policy from international comparisons across health systems. The OECD has developed a large international database on health and health system data for the OECD area. For many years that data has been published on a CD-ROM (OECD Health Data). The main aim of this publication — Health at a Glance — is to display some of the key indicators from OECD Health Data in an easily accessible, printed form. Hence, this document makes extensive use of charts, graphs and tables. A subsidiary aim is to draw attention to some of the messages for policy which can be derived from OECD Health Data. (Author/publisher)
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