At the beginning of February, Karl Lauterbach announced that we didn’t know how many people were mentally or chronically ill and what income or migration background had to do with it. This is not acceptable:
“It is a health policy scandal that we currently have no representative overview of how healthy the population actually is.”
Well, his examples weren’t the best; the RKI has been providing data on the influence of social situation or migration background on health for many years. But there really are data gaps that should finally be closed. Perhaps the planned federal institute BIPAM could help with this.
Here are 10 topics to get you started, the list can be extended in the comments:
1. How many people are forcibly housed in psychiatric clinics in Germany, for how long, why and how does this differ between the federal states?
2. How many assisted suicides are there in Germany and what were the people’s motivations?
3. How many people end up in the hospital because of a suicide attempt?
4. How many alternative practitioners are there in Germany and what do they do?
5. What is the distribution of early retirement due to illness by profession in Germany?
6. How high are the occupational accident rates by industry for the individual federal states?
7. How high is the sickness rate in the federal states across different types of insurance companies?
8. How many women drink alcohol during pregnancy, a glass or even more? How many children are born with health problems every year?
9. How many children suffer psychologically because they grow up in poor families?
10. How much money is spent on prevention at the federal state level?
Personally, I would also be interested to know how many people know more state health ministers by name than football coaches. But that might be more for Günther Jauch at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” than for BIPAM.