Case report Norway

Norway gathers health information about the population through the 18 central law-regulated health registries and a system of questionnaire-based health surveys. The health registries, including the Medical Birth Registry (founded in 1967) and the Cause of Death Registry (founded in 1951) contain information about the entire population, with data linked to the unique personal identification number, which makes them valuable and trustworthy data sources. In general, surveys can be less dependable, in that participation rates are falling, and participants may not be representative. International data reporting has been regarded as important for Norway, which has reported data to WHO's Health for All database back to 1970. When the SDG indicators were requested by the UN and WHO, Norway was able to deliver 26 of the 28 indicators (93%) on the UN list, though some indicators, such as 3.3.3 (Malaria incidence), were regarded as unnecessary. Indicators 3.5.1 (Substance use treatment interventions) and 3.b.3 (Health facilities with essential medicines) are not reported because of the organisation of the health system. From 2015, the Norwegian Ministry of Health and other national agencies have discussed the validity of the SDG targets for Norway. In 2017, Statistics Norway published a report about the availability of SDG indicators for Norway, and in 2018 a meeting between the relevant ministries resulted in a decision to start reporting the official UN indicators. In 2021 Statistics Norway published a taxonomy of the SDG indicators, and the same year, published all available indicators in a bilingual SDG portal on their web pages. The same year, the Norwegian Ministry of Health decided to start adding to the official UN SDG 3 indicators, and in collaboration between the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Statistics Norway, 16 extra indicators describing the SDG 3 targets have been defined and are being published, with another 20 in the pipeline.