Abstract

In all stages of the development of societies, the objective of health policy has been to promote health, as measured by an increase in life expectancy. Not until the past two decades has an awareness grown that resources to be invested in health are limited and that the increase in survival may mean an increase in years spent in health but also in years spent with disease as the additional effect of socio-economic development and medical technology. This appreciation has created a need for an integrated approach to determine the positive and negative effects of socio-economic and technological advances on the level of health and disease in population as a whole. The purpose of this report is to explore the usefulness of the sustainable development concept, as used in environmental modelling research, in the search for a more comprehensive health policy approach. The application of sustainable development concepts for a comprehensive approach to health policy is a worthwhile enterprise as one can account for the role of health determinants, the beneficial and negative effects of preventive and curative care, as well as the limits to the necessary resources for health and the overall effects of economic development. Two important issues in the development of the model are the framing of an integrated methodology to allow for the inclusion of various sets of determinants and disease-specific subsidiary-models as well as the collection of global and regional data for model validation.