Comparison of National Database of Health Inequality between Korea and the UK:Focusing on Substance Misuse Related Mental Health and Respiratory Diseases

ABSTRACT

Objective@#Taking action on health inequalities starts with the production of information laying out the problems of inequalities, but Korean society has no national database to view related data at a glance. This study aimed to compare Korean national database with the Public Health Profile (PHP), a health inequality database of the UK. @*Methods@#Data were collected from the websites of government and relevant organizations in the both countries between March and August 2020, which was updated in August 2021. Two themes including Co-occurring substance misuse and mental health issues in mental health and INteractive Health Atlas of Lung conditions in England were selected for comparison in terms of data accessibility, data usability and data visualization. @*Results@#The British PHP is being served on a web-based platform, Fingertips. The data collected at the regional level were presented on 31 health inequality themes. The data are displayed at a level that can be compared between comparable communities, and visualized into various tables and figures. Comparable Korean data were scattered in several themes and websites, and mostly provided as a 17 administrative region base, which was too vast to make a meaningful comparisons. @*Conclusion@#The findings proposed several considerations which could be useful for establishing a database of health inequality in the Korean society.