Explainer
Excess Mortality: What It Measures and Why It Matters
How excess mortality is defined and estimated, what it revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and major heatwaves, and how to read the figures without being misled.
Focus area 01
Public Health & Health Systems
Public health and health systems research examines how countries organise, finance, and deliver health care, and how population health is measured and compared — including indicators such as life expectancy, excess mortality, and coverage of essential services.
Health systems differ widely in how they raise money, pool risk, and pay providers, yet they are frequently compared with single headline numbers. This programme of work explains the major system models, the indicators used to compare them, and the caveats that responsible comparisons require.
Our emphasis is on measurement: what statistics such as life expectancy, excess mortality, and universal health coverage actually capture, how they are produced, and where they can mislead.
Questions this programme addresses
- How do the main health system models (tax-funded, social insurance, mixed) differ in financing and coverage?
- What do population health indicators such as life expectancy and excess mortality measure, and what are their limits?
- Why do international health comparisons often disagree, and how can they be read responsibly?
Publications in this area
Primer
Randomised Controlled Trials in Public Policy: A Primer
Why randomisation is the cleanest route to causal claims, the landmark policy trials that proved the method’s worth, and the questions RCTs cannot answer.
Explainer
Health System Models Compared: Beveridge, Bismarck, and Beyond
The four classic models of health system financing, which countries use them, why every real system is a hybrid, and what the labels do and do not explain.