PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

While population health monitoring, as presented in this book, qualifies as one key approach to using information and evidence for health policy-making, additional organized approaches are frequently used at the interface of (health) science and (health) governance. This is largely due to the fact that in public health, most of the professional activities aim to promote, protect, and restore human health. Additional purposes include the promotion of equity, sustainability, efficiency, responsiveness, and accountability of and within health systems and policies. Therefore, public health research is mostly applied, aiming to support policy-making and governance for better health both within the health sector and beyond. From this background, the science-governance interface deserves, and receives, particular attention in public health. In order to support decision-making, different kinds of policy questions are being asked here; and different health assessment approaches to answer such questions are being pursued. This chapter aims to provoke fruitful and inspiring comparisons between population health monitoring and other types of assessments. It covers definitions, goals, procedures, and methods of such assessments, in a comparative way. It outlines practical examples, describes how various assessment types relate to population health monitoring, and sketches current and future developments. The chapter is based on collaborative work carried out within the EUPHA Initiative on Health Assessments (Fehr et al. 2017).