Community statistics on public health and health and safety at work

In its Plenary vote on 13 November 2007, the European Parliament adopted 12 first-reading amendments. The Council's common position incorporates 10 of them entirely and 1 partly.

The Council proposed the following main changes to the Commission proposal:

Recitals: the amendments concern:

• the inclusions of gender and age in the breakdown variables in the two areas covered by the regulation (public health and health and safety at work) have been added in order to obtain information concerning any gender and age differences in these two areas;
• helping Member States to build up capacity to introduce new tools for collecting statistical data using additional and complementary financial resources provided by the Community programmes in the two areas covered by the regulation.

Articles: the amendments aim to: 

• lay down the conditions and standards governing the production of Community statistics;
• emphasise the importance of data collection for supporting national strategies to guarantee universal access to public health services in the Member States. Account has been taken of the amendment on the coordination of Community statistical activities with those of other international organisations, in order to limit the burden on Member States. The Council has adopted a more general approach without listing all the international or European organisations active in the fields covered by the Regulation.

Annexes: amendments have been added to include protection against possible pandemics and transmissible diseases and alcohol- and drug-related harm among the subjects covered by the "Health status and health determinants" domain. Another amendment concerning the scope of the "Occupational diseases and other work-related health problems and illnesses" domain (Annex V) has been taken into consideration in order to cover both physical and mental and social illnesses and problems caused, worsened or jointly caused by the working environment. An amendment has been accepted to include gender, age and employment status of the person and the size and economic activity of the enterprise among the subjects covered by Annex V.

Only one amendment concerning the inclusion of the tracking of any disease whose incidence is increasing or decreasing in the list of subjects covered was not taken into account as the Council considered, like the Commission, that a change in incidence of a disease was by definition an important aspect of the analysis and dissemination of morbidity data and could not form a separate subject.