Monitoring and assessing the functioning of the healthcare system requires the development of additional analytical tools that enable a systematic description of financial flows related to healthcare. For several years the team from the Centre for Health and Health Care Statistics at the Statistical Office in Kraków has been dealing with the issue of estimating the economic dimension of the functioning of this sector in the national economy. Poland is one of the few countries that, in parallel with the development of the national health account, elaborated the methodology for a satellite health account and made related calculations.

In this publication, we present in a synthetic form the issue of the satellite health account. Our goal is to explain step by step how we conduct the calculations, and thus how we determine the actual role of the health care sector in the national economy, with particular emphasis on the share in the GDP creation.