World health statistics 2019: monitoring health for the SDGs, sustainable development goals

The World Health Statistics series is the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) annual compilation of health statistics for its 194 Member States. The series is produced by WHO’s Division for Data, Analytics and Delivery, in collaboration with WHO technical departments and regional offices. 

World health statistics 2019 summarizes recent trends and levels in life expectancy and causes of death (Section 1) and reports on the health and health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and associated targets (Sections 2–8). It then summarizes the major findings, including the availability of underlying data for monitoring progress towards the health-related SDGs (Section 9), and concludes by briefly discussing the implications for health policy and the planning of programmes (Section 10). Annex 1 provides regional level statistics, Annex 2 presents country-level statistics for selected health-related SDG indicators and Annex 3 summarizes WHO regional groupings. 

The 2019 report disaggregates data by WHO region, World Bank income group1 and sex where possible, and it discusses differences in health status and access to preventive and curative services, particularly in relation to differences between men and women. Where possible, it indicates the roles of sex, as a biological determinant, and gender, as a social construct, in accounting for the observed differences as shown in the table below. Because the focus of World health statistics is on life expectancy, causes of death and SDG indicators, it does not capture some important health differences between men and women such as anaemia or other morbidities.