Uppsala Health Economics researchers launch free observatory monitoring child health equity across all 290 Swedish municipalities

Researchers at Uppsala Health Economics (UHE), Department of Public Health and Caring Sciences, Uppsala University, have developed the Child Health Equity Observatory, a freely accessible, bilingual platform that monitors child health equity indicators across all 290 Swedish municipalities.

The observatory, developed by Sergio Flores together with colleagues Inna Feldman and Filipa Sampaio, draws on data originating from five Swedish government agencies: the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR), Statistics Sweden, the Public Health Agency of Sweden, the National Board of Health and Welfare, and the National Agency for Education. The platform assembles more than 40 indicators spanning up to 14 years into a unified, interactive tool.

"The data has always existed, but scattered across separate databases with different formats and access points," says Sergio Flores, health economist at UHE and lead developer of the observatory. "A municipal child health coordinator who wants to understand how vaccination coverage, child poverty, preschool enrollment, and staffing levels interact in their community had to assemble this picture manually, every time. We built the assembly once, for everyone."

The platform provides interactive maps, trend analyses, peer benchmarking between comparable municipalities, resource-outcome analysis comparing municipal spending and child health results, population forecasting, and municipality-specific analytical briefs. It includes a composite Child Health Care (CHC) Prioritisation Index, which combines indicators across service delivery, social determinants, and municipal capacity, to identify municipalities where the gap between child health needs and service delivery appears the largest. The index creation methodology, including robustness validation through Monte Carlo simulation, is described in a companion paper in preparation for peer-reviewed publication.

Sweden's child health services (barnhälsovård) reach virtually all children, but outcomes vary substantially. Over 180 municipalities fall below the WHO-recommended 95 percent threshold for MMR vaccination coverage at age two. Child poverty rates range from 0.2 percent to over 14 percent across municipalities. The observatory makes these disparities visible and comparable for the first time in an integrated format.

"This is not a ranking or a judgment," says Flores. "It is a tool for increasing equity, directing attention and resources where the gap between needs and delivery is greatest."

The observatory is built entirely on publicly available open data and is designed as a sustainable research infrastructure. UHE will continue to maintain and develop the platform, with planned extensions including tailored regional decision support, policy intelligence monitoring, and individual-level data linkage through future research grants.

The observatory is freely accessible at www.barnhalsovard.se.