Quality report: Promotion of Health and Wellbeing in Municipal Management – TEA 2025
Data description
Statistical presentation
The data on the promotion of health and wellbeing in municipal management, collected by the National Institute for Health and Wel-fare (THL), describes the role and significance of municipal man-agement in the promotion of health and wellbeing across all sectors of municipal administration. In particular, the reported data de-scribes the preconditions that enable efficient and effective management of health and wellbeing promotion work across all administrative domains. The data does not describe operational or daily activities.
The data collection is part of the benchmarking system of health promotion capacity building (TEAviisari), which has been developed in cooperation with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Finnish National Agency for Education. The bench-marking system highlights the work undertaken by municipalities and wellbeing services counties to promote the health and wellbeing of their residents in seven different sectors. In addition to municipal strategic management, information is collected on health promotion capacity building in comprehensive education, physical activity, gen-eral upper secondary education, vocational education and training, culture, and wellbeing services counties.
The data collection targeting municipal management has been car-ried out in odd-numbered years since 2011, in cooperation with the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities. The data collection is prepared by an expert group that includes in addition to the national responsible parties the representatives of municipalities and wellbeing services counties, including the Finnish Healthy Cities Network. The group reviews the results and feedback of the previous data collection, considers emerging data needs and the resulting changes to the survey questionnaire. Before the start of the data collection, the draft questionnaire is sent to experts outside the group and to the management group of the Finnish Healthy Cities Network for comments.
The data primarily reflects the situation at the time of data collec-tion. It is necessary to collect some information from the previous year or council term, such as realised resources, monitoring and re-porting of population health and wellbeing, and strategic‑level com-mitments in key municipal policy documents.
Relevance
The data is used, among other purposes, to assess reforms to the structure of health and social care services and to support the steering and supervision of the health and wellbeing promotion. The data is also used in the calculation of the additional amount for the promotion of health and wellbeing in central government transfers to municipalities for basic public services.
The data enables municipalities and regions to develop and evaluate the state of health and wellbeing promotion in relation to the na-tional or other municipalities situation. The information is intended for municipal and city authorities, national and regional authorities, as well as decisionmakers, planners and researchers.
Data content of the statistics
The target group of these statistics is municipalities in mainland Finland. The Promotion of Health and Wellbeing in Municipal Man-agement is divided into five different dimensions: commitment, management, monitoring and needs assessment, resources and participation.
- Commitment describes the municipality’s strategic-level com-mitment to promoting health and wellbeing, including the visibility of the theme in key policy documents and the use of indicators that support implementation as part of the financial planning pro-cess.
- Management describes the organisation, allocation of responsibili-ties and implementation of the promotion of health and wellbe-ing.
- Monitoring and needs assessment describes the monitoring of factors influencing the promotion of health and wellbeing, and needs analysis by population group, as well as reporting to the management/working group and elected officials.
- The resources describes the work input of professionals engaged in health and wellbeing promotion and the grants awarded by municipalities to non-profit organisations serving households.
- Participation describes residents’ opportunities to participate in the development and evaluation of services.
Statistical processing
Source data
The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare compiles the data re-quired for the Promotion of Health and Wellbeing in Municipal Man-agement from several sources. In 2025, a total of 48 indicators re-lated to municipalities’ strategic management were used, of which 47 were collected directly from municipal chief executives or other senior officials via a survey. Grants awarded to organisations, includ-ing grants paid to non-profit organisations serving households, were obtained from the State Treasury. (State Treasury 2024).
The data describes the five dimensions of health promotion activity: commitment, management, monitoring and needs assesment, resources, and participation. The dimension-specific scores are produced by scoring information describing the municipality's activities in relation to legislation, recommendations and best practices. The overall score is calculated as the mean of the dimension scores. The indicators are scored on a scale of 0 to 100. Scores describe how well the promotion of health and wellbeing is implemented in mu-nicipalities. A score of 100 indicates that the activities are in line with best practices and good quality in all respects.
Example of indicator scoring:
Question 11. Has the evaluation report prepared by the Audit Com-mittee assessed the achievement of your municipality's health and wellbeing goals during this council term?
- No information (0 points)
- No (0 points)
- Yes (100 points)
Regional scores are calculated as population-weighted averages of municipal scores.
Data collected under the changing themes dimension is used solely to support national development work. This data is not scored in TEAviisari. The information is utilised at national level in planning support for the promotion of health and wellbeing in municipalities.
Data collection
Data on the promotion of health and wellbeing in municipal man-agement is collected every two years in the spring of odd-numbered years. Login credentials and a link to the digital survey are sent by email to all municipal chief executives. The data is requested to be complied in cooperation with the welfare coordinator and the mu-nicipality's management group. Information about the beginning of the data collection is also sent to the municipal registries and to the welfare coordinators and contact persons. Reminders to submit the information is sent twice by email. In addition, a contact person at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare contacts all non-responding municipalities personally by telephone during the summer.
The data collection materials, such as the survey questionnaire, are available in TEAviisari.
Data validation
The instruction was to process the survey questionnaire jointly with the wellbeing coordinator within the municipal management team. The majority (87%) of municipalities reported that they had pro-cessed the survey questionnaire in the municipal management group 73% of municipalities, the responses were prepared jointly by the municipal chief executive and the management group. In almost half of the municipalities (48%), a wellbeing coordinator or equivalent person participated in preparing the responses. Dedicated health and wellbeing promotion working groups participated in a smaller share of municipalities (18%).
In 2025, to improve data quality and reliability, two survey items were systematically reviewed and audited. The data audit covered the existing local safety plan (question 4) and the existence of writ-ten guidelines for impact assessment (question 18). A total of 329 reported data items were reviewed. The Yes answers to the ques-tions selected for the audit were verified by examining the infor-mation found on the municipalities' websites and the documents in question. Where the information could not be verified, municipalities were contacted by email or telephone and asked to provide clarifi-cation or confirmation. As a result of the audit, 81 data items were amended. For eight municipalities, both audited survey items were changed. From the perspective of reliability, it was essential that the provision of incorrect information was not systematic. Individual in-correct entries were corrected in the data collection, and retrospec-tive corrections remain possible where necessary.
In addition to the above, all municipalities were asked to verify indi-cators describing the work input of professionals responsible for the coordination, administration and planning of health and wellbeing promotion. Corrections to these items were made by 54 municipalities.
Data compilation
The quality of the published statistical data is ensured through au-dits carried out in connection with each data collection round, as described in Section 3.3. "Data Validation".
Data revision
These statistics are based on a comprehensive data collection car-ried out at a single point in time and in general, the data are not supplemented after publication. However, individual municipality-level data may be corrected retrospectively in TEAviisari where necessary.
Quality assessment of the statistics
Accuracy and reliability
The statistical data are based on factual and objective information reported by municipalities. The operational data collected through the survey are of a type that all municipalities can provide for the purposes of data collection. Of the individual data items utilised in TEAviisari (48 in total), 248 municipalities provided fully comprehen-sive responses, meaning that no data items were missing. In 97% of all responses, fewer than 5% of data items were missing.
In 2025, to further improve the quality and reliability of the data, two items included in the survey questionnaire were systematically re-viewed and verified. In addition, municipalities were asked to check and confirm data describing the work input of professionals involved in the promotion of health and wellbeing (see Section 3.3).
Timeliness and punctuality
Data on the promotion of health and wellbeing in municipal man-agement are collected in the spring of odd-numbered years. Ques-tion-level basic distributions are published as preliminary infor-mation in basic tables in September of the same year, broken down by municipality size, statistical municipal grouping, Regional State Administrative Agency area and wellbeing services county.
Municipality-level data are reported as scored results in TEAviisari in early October of the data collection year. The data are presented as pre-analysed summaries and as visual graphs that support the plan-ning, management and evaluation of activities. TEAviisari provides an overall picture and helps to identify the key strengths and develop-ment needs of municipalities’ strategic management.
Coherence and comparability
The statistics comprehensively contain data on the promotion of health and wellbeing for the whole country from the perspective of the strategic management of municipalities (99.7% of municipalities in 2025). Coverage was 99% in 2023, 92% in 2021, 93% in 2019, 92% in 2017, 79% in 2015, 67% in 2013 and 58% in 2011.
Data on the promotion of health and wellbeing in municipal man-agement have been collected in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025. The key information content has remained the same. Some new indicators have been developed, and minor changes have also been made to the data content. In 2017, a section on changing themes was added to the data collection questionnaire to serve, for example, the monitoring of key projects within the administrative branch of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. In 2019, the re-sources of municipal management were measured for the first time.
In 2025, there were a total of 48 indicators; in 2023, 59 indicators; in 2021, 58 indicators; in 2019, 66 indicators; in 2017, 50 indicators; in 2015, 72 indicators; in 2013, 64 indicators; and in 2011, 47 indicators.
By dimension, the indicators in 2025 were as follows: commitment 21, management 6, monitoring and needs assessment 10, resources 2, and participation 9. Compared with 2023, three new indicators were added, and 14 indicators were omitted.
Both indicators in the Resources dimension were renewed. In 2023, grants to corporations (4742) were extracted from the State Treas-ury without a sectoral limitation, whereas in 2025 the extraction was restricted to subsidies paid to non-profit organisations serving households. In addition to the professional responsible for the coor-dination, planning and administration of health and wellbeing promo-tion, it was, unlike in previous years, also possible to report the work input of other health and wellbeing promotion professionals.
In 2025, the question concerning the local safety plan was clarified to apply to a valid document. The promotion of sustainable devel-opment was linked to strategic documents. In addition, questions concerning the interface between municipalities and wellbeing ser-vices counties were retained to highlight the changes that have tak-en place following the health and social services reform. The ques-tion concerning the objectives for promoting residents’ participation was also specified.
Three questions were added to the changing themes section con-cerning the implementation of health and wellbeing negotiations, the common objectives, measures and practices agreed in these negoti-ations, and the practices used to inform one another of changes in the population’s wellbeing, health and risk behaviour. In addition, three questions concerning the health and wellbeing coefficient and the measures undertaken in municipalities based on this coefficient were added to the changing themes section. The questions in the changing themes section are not scored in TEAviisari, but they sup-port national development work.
Institutional mandate
The production of the statistics is based on the Act on the National Institute for Health and Welfare (688/2008) and the Statistics Act (280/2004). The statutory task of the National Institute for Health and Welfare is to produce statistical data on the health and wellbe-ing of the population, the factors affecting them, and the use and functioning of social and health care services in support of decision-making, development and research. The Institute’s statistical pro-duction practices are guided by the guidelines, recommendations and regulations of Eurostat and the Official Statistics of Finland, as well as the principles of statistical ethics.
Act on the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Finlex)
Statistics Act (Finlex) (in Finnish and Swedish)
Data sharing and publishing
THL publishes the data at the time indicated in advance in the sta-tistics publication calendar. The data is made public to all users at the same time. The statistical release calendar is available on the website of the National Institute for Health and Welfare. In addition, municipal officials and contact persons for the promotion of wellbe-ing and health (including municipal chief executives and wellbeing coordinators) are informed of the publication date through separate TEAviisari information messages.
Confidentiality
As an authority, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare has the obligation to produce compiled data on the health and wellbeing concerned with the entire country. The data used to draw up THL’s statistics is primarily confidential, and personal data may not be published. The protection of processed data is based on the Act on the National Institute for Health and Welfare (688/2008), the Statis-tics Act (280/2004), the Act on the Openness of Government Activities (621/1999), the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 and the Data Protection Act (1050/2018) as well as other regulations guiding the activities of the Institute.
Act on the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Finlex)
Statistics Act (Finlex) (in Finnish and Swedish)
Act on the Openness of Government Activities (Finlex)
EU General Data Protection Regulation (EU)
Data Protection Act (Finlex)
THL’s datasets are secured at all stages of processing. Data and in-formation systems can only be accessed by people who have a permit to access certain data for clearly defined purposes. Others do not have the ability to view, process, change or delete data. Written instructions have been drawn up to ensure the data protection of completed statistics. All THL personnel are bound by a confidentiality obligation.
The data presented in these statistics are organisation-level data and do not include personal data relating to individuals.
Special issues concerning the 2025 statistics
One municipality did not submit its information: Lestijärvi.