The Minimum European Health Module (MEHM) is a set of three global questions on:

• General Perceived Health
• Chronic Health Problems
• Global Activity Limitation

especially designed by the Euro-REVES group to allow comparable calculations of health expectancies across Europe. (Robine et al, 2003). The MEHM has been implemented in several national and European surveys such as EU-SILC, SHARE, and the new European Health Interview Survey (EHIS).

All relevant documents related to the development, implementation, and use of this module are gathered in a technical report summarizing its development.

See: The Minimum European Health Module: background documents – EHEMU Technical report 2010-4.6

The main background documents can be directly accessed through the list at the bottom of this page.



Until 2008, the implementation of the health questions in SILC was not fully harmonized and, thus, the comparability of the results was limited. New guidelines for this question were provided by Eurostat in October 2007 to the Member States, in order to improve the data comparability from 2008 onwards.

See: Eurostat-EU Task Force on Health Expectancies common statement about the SILC data quality

The wording of these questions in the successive EU-SILC questionnaires since 2004 in each national language can be accessed hereunder.

Austria | Belgium | Bulgaria | Cyprus | CzechRepublic | Denmark | Estonia | Finland | France | Germany | Greece | Hungary | Ireland | Italy | Latvia | Lithuania | Luxembourg | Malta | Netherlands | Poland | Portugal | Romania | Slovakia | Slovenia | Spain | Sweden | United-Kingdom

All countries in a single document

MEHM_SILC_Pilot_version	MEHM_SILC_2004-2007_version
MEHM_SILC_2008_version	MEHM_EHIS_2003_draft_version
MEHM_EHIS_2005_draft_version	MEHM_EHIS_2006_version
MEHM_SHARE_2004_and_2006_versions	MEHM_EUROBARAMETER_2002_version
MEHM_EUROBARAMETER_2005_version