English Abstract In all stages of the development of societies, the
objective of health policy has been to promote health, as measured by an
increase in life expectancy. Not until the past two decades has an
awareness grown that resources to be invested in health are limited and that
the increase in survival may mean an increase in years spent in health but
also in years spent with disease as the additional effect of socio-economic
development and medical technology. This appreciation has created a need
for an integrated approach to determine the positive and negative effects of
socio-economic and technological advances on the level of health and disease
in population as a whole. The purpose of this report is to explore the
usefulness of the sustainable development concept, as used in environmental
modelling research, in the search for a more comprehensive health policy
approach. The application of sustainable development concepts for a
comprehensive approach to health policy is a worthwhile enterprise as one
can account for the role of health determinants, the beneficial and negative
effects of preventive and curative care, as well as the limits to the
necessary resources for health and the overall effects of economic
development. Two important issues in the development of the model are the
framing of an integrated methodology to allow for the inclusion of various
sets of determinants and disease-specific subsidiary-models as well as the
collection of global and regional data for model
validation.