Time to reap the fruits of EU-SILC’s new way of measuring unmet needs Open Access

Abstract

A change in the methodology of the EU-SILC questionnaire on health needs, implemented from 2015 onwards, made it possible to distinguish the probability of a person saying they needed care from the probability that they received it. However, datasets taking advantage of this change were not published by Eurostat until the end of 2023 and offered only limited possibilities for disaggregation. In this article, we show how useful these results can be, despite their limitations. In order to facilitate more and better research into health inequalities in Europe, Eurostat should give priority to publishing more datasets as soon as possible.