“International agencies and the GBD study began producing annual reports of country estimates for the health-related SDG indicators in 2016. Of the 52 health-related indicators, GBD 2017 reported on 41, WHO reported on 37 in its 2018 World Health Statistics report,⁶ the World Bank covered 33 in its 2018 SDG Atlas,⁷ and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network included 27.⁴ Standardisation of definitions and methods used to calculate the health-related SDG indicators could improve comparability across organisations and collaborations involved in monitoring the SDGs. The complete set of metadata for SDG indicators, provided by the UN and other international organisations, comes with instructions on how indicators should be measured.⁸¹ However, GBD approaches to measurement differ from WHO approaches in various ways. For example, we use age-standardised rates for indicators that include mortality or incidence (eg, NCD mortality, suicide mortality, probability of death), whereas WHO generally use all-age rates. Furthermore, we define child overweight in terms of body-mass index for age and sex to align with the definition of overweight and obesity for adults, rather than in terms of weight for height. We also include all women of reproductive age in measurement of the met need for family planning indicator rather than limiting this measure to only women who are married or in a union. GBD also offers estimates for more years and locations than other organisations currently do, supporting the overarching SDG endeavour of leaving no one behind.

“Strengths
“An important strength of GBD 2017 is the increasing number of collaborators involved: participation increased by more than 44% from 2016, with collaborators from 144 countries and two territories. The collaborator network offers multiple benefits to the GBD study, and in the case of the SDGs, it provides the particular benefit of supporting international and national policy dialogue, connecting technical information to the political needs of the health-related SDGs. Health programmes and plans have a limited chance of success in the absence of robust evidence and policy dialogue. The benchmarking presented in GBD 2017 can help countries to promote and increase accountability at the national level. The bottom line is the need to enhance mutual understanding of the SDG agenda across the entire global range of stakeholders and to champion the importance of national ownership of local guidance, monitoring, and management in achieving SDG targets.

“To facilitate comparisons across locations and over time of the diverse array of health-related SDG indicators, we have produced an overall SDG index since GBD 2015.^5,13 The health-related SDG index is not presented in lieu of monitoring individual indicators, which we also do here. Instead, this index provides a mechanism by which overall performance across health-related SDGs can be more easily compared. A single, robust measurement such as the health-related SDG index is a useful tool for policy makers and other decision makers to interpret the performance of a particular location. With the production of time trends for several indicators, the SDG index also facilitates the understanding of the pace of progress. While index values represent a combination of different dimensions considered together as a proxy of health-related SDG indicator performance, results reported by individual indicator allow for more nuanced analyses.”

Source: GBD 2017 SDG Collaborators. “Measuring progress from 1990 to 2017 and projecting attainment to 2030 of the health-related Sustainable Development Goals for 195 countries and territories: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.” Lancet (London, England) vol. 392,10159 (2018): 2091-2138. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32281-5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6227911/