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The need for global and individual health status indices in addition to traditional mortality and morbidity statistics is explained. A classification model for sorting various health status indices into homogeneous groups is presented to facilitate systematic review of selected health status indices. Problems for users and authors of health status indices are briefly discussed with a view to the development of more practical indices in the future.

In the absence of service use and health status data at the individual level in most developing countries of the world, the utility of the physician/population ratio as a proxy measure of health service availability and use in health needs assessment is tested. Data from 60 predominantly developing countries show that the physician/population ratio is curvilinearly related to an indicator of population health status, namely infant mortality. When this relation is linearized by logarithmic transformations, the physician/population ratio accounts for 53% of the variance in infant mortality. There is no significant functional relationship between the physician/population ratio and infant mortality when state-level data in the US are analysed. Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to needs assessment in developing regions of the world.

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