title: [Health surveys: lights and shadows].
abstract: Surveys are relevant tolls to analyze social changes and its methods are appropriate to know about the distribution of perceptions and behaviors of different phenomena related to health and disease. Health surveys (HS) are usually focused on areas like social and demographic characteristics, health related behaviors, health status and health services utilization. They provide with information that is not possible to reach through other systematic data sources and are crucial to assist decision making in health policy. HS provide data from the general population which is complementary of that obtained through other procedures and takes into account the various dimensions and connections of health and health system. They are very important in health planning because of its adaptability different need, circumstances or population groups, and in all cases, when properly used, they provide with new knowledge that can be shared. Among its limitations it must be emphasized its reduced capacity to catch all the complexity of social phenomena, its high cost, and the need of a very strong work to coordinate different expert teams and its poor capacity to offer accurate estimates when little geographic areas or low prevalence phenomena are studied. The areas and opportunities for innovation in the design, data gathering and data analysis of HS are actually various and there is a need to try to optimize all its potentialities to get a better knowledge about populations' health and social reality.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Salut, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, España. pilar.brugulat@gencat.cat
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Brugulat-Guiteras
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mompart-Penina
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Séculi-Sánchez
authors.forename: Ricard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Tresserras-Gaju
authors.forename: María Luisa
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: de la Puente-Martorell
mesh_terms: D006306:Health Surveys; D007256:Information Systems