About REVES

Réseau Espérance de Vie en Santé (REVES) is an international organization that promotes the use of health expectancy as a population health indicator. As disability-free life expectancy was the first, and remains a major measure useful for cross-national comparisons of the health status of populations, REVES members are also involved in the definition, measurement, and comparison of disability globally.

The REVES network was set up in 1989 by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM, Montpelier), the Social Affairs Council, Quebec, Canada, and the Center for Demographic Studies, Durham, North Carolina, United States. REVES now includes over 150 scientists and policy makers representing 30 countries worldwide as well as a wide range of professional disciplines including demography, epidemiology, gerontology, sociology, psychology, public health, health economics, medicine, biology, and statistics.

1) undertake research and disseminate findings for the comparison and interpretation of health expectancies both cross-nationally and over time;

2) promote the use of health expectancy for public policy and planning and for the evaluation of public health programs; and

3) research and promote the use of standardized methods for collection of underlying health and disability data and for calculation of health expectancies.

The research domains of REVES are: cross-national comparability, socioeconomic and gender differences, trends overtime, computation methods and softwares, contribution of chronic diseases to health expectancy. Since 1989, REVES has developed several activities:

• collecting bibliographic references from all over the world in order to provide a complete data base on health expectancy research

• proposing a conceptual framework to organize the domain and classify all the health expectancy estimations

• assembling studies in order to provide a synthesis of patterns and trends in health expectancy worldwide

• discussing methodological issues to compute health expectancy

• organizing annual meeting in order to allow the presentation and discussion on the recent researches