Finbalt Health Monitor

Finbalt Health Monitor in a nutshell

• The Finbalt Health Monitor is a collaborative project for monitoring health related behaviour, practices and lifestyles in Estonia since 1990, Finland since 1978, Latvia since 1998, and in Lithuania since 1994.

• The system monitors behaviour such as smoking, alcohol consumption, food habits and physical activity.

• The project was put into action in order to serve national health policy and health promotion and to carry out comparative studies related to major public health problems in the participating countries.

• The core of the project is a mailed questionnaire to nationally representative samples.

Social change around the Baltic Sea was the initiator

The starting point of the Finbalt Health Monitor project was the contrast in health conditions around the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s – life expectancy was increasing in Finland and decreasing in the Baltic countries. Despite many cultural ties and geographical closeness of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the countries had gone through different stages of economic, social and public health development since the mid-20th century.

As social changes are known to influence the health and lifestyle of individuals, the Baltic Sea region was thought to provide a unique opportunity for the study of health behaviour in the context of social change in the beginning of 1990s. The project focused from the start on behavioral risk factors of non-communicable diseases, as they are the major causes of mortality in all four countries, as in the whole Europe.

Roots of the Finbalt project are in the Finnish North Karelia

The origins of the Finbalt monitoring are in the Finnish North Karelia project, a demonstration program for prevention of cardiovascular diseases that started in 1978. The researchers of the North Karelia project evaluated the effects of the program with repeated surveys on health behaviour and risk factors. Gradually the surveys grew into a national monitoring system, the AVTK survey, which formed eventually the basis for the Finbalt Health Monitor.

Extension to the Baltic countries occurred in the 1990s

The health behaviour monitoring system was launched in Estonia in 1990 in collaboration with the National Public Health Institute of Finland, KTL (nowadays National Institute for Health and Welfare, THL). The first monitoring round coincided with a Finnish-Estonian smoking cessation program. The health monitoring system was extended to Lithuania in 1994 and Latvia joined the project in 1997. The survey was carried out simultaneously in all Baltic countries and Finland for the first time in spring 1998.

Finbalt data is widely used internationally and nation-wise

The Finbalt Health Monitor is a unique project, as there are very no other projects that have succeeded in collecting comparative data on working age population from four countries and using nationally representative samples over a ten-year period. Results of the national surveys have provoked great interest both among experts and ordinary citizens. The systems have been widely used by health administrators, health promoters, policy planners and researchers.

The data is suitable for comparing time trends and patterns of health behaviour. The data are primarily appropriate for estimating the prevalence of common health behaviours in the general population. The unavoidable bias caused by cultural factors can be leveled off if, instead of national averages, patterns of variation in selected habits are compared. The data continues to be available for the uses of national and international actors.

Information about the project