Terms and conditions

1. What this portal is — and is not

This portal is an independent project by Dr Stefan Buttigieg. It republishes, in open and interactive form, statistics that were originally released as PDF tables by two directorates of the Ministry for Health, Malta:

• the Directorate for Health Information and Research (DHIR), Ministry for Health, Malta — Health Interview Surveys and the wider DHIR publication library; and
• the Infectious Disease Prevention & Control Unit (IDCU) — notifiable disease surveillance tables.

The portal is not an official product of either directorate, and neither directorate has reviewed or endorsed its design, charts, chatbot answers or derived figures. Each directorate holds the rights in its own underlying data and analysis.

2. Permitted use and attribution

• You may view, download, print, share and reuse the tables and charts, including for research, teaching, journalism and policy work.
• Every reuse must attribute the original publishing directorate — the DHIR or IDCU as applicable — as the source of the statistics. The recommended citation for the Health Interview Surveys trend report is given on the Document information page.
• You must not present the figures, or anything built on them, in a way that suggests a directorate, the Ministry for Health or this portal endorses your interpretation, product or organisation.
• You must not alter values and continue to present them as official statistics. Derived or recalculated figures — including charts made in the chart builder — are your own work and must be labelled as such.

3. Accuracy and quality flags

Values are extracted from published PDF documents and, where possible, verified against the source (see the Document information page for the verification record). Despite this, no guarantee of freedom from error is given. Where a figure shown here differs from the printed publication, the printed publication prevails.

• Some extracted tables are flagged “Needs review”, “Check against PDF” or “Minor issue” because automated verification found structural or value inconsistencies. Treat flagged tables with particular caution.
• IDCU tables from roughly before 2020 were extracted from PDFs with irregular layouts (including shifted resident/non-resident rows) and may be unreliable.
• Indicators are not available for every survey wave; missing values are shown as “–” and must not be read as zero.

4. AI-assisted answers (“Ask the Data”)

The chatbot answers questions using the portal's extracted tables. Its answers are generated automatically, may be incomplete or wrong, and are not official statements of any directorate. Always check the cited table before relying on a chatbot answer.

5. No professional advice

The content is population-level statistical information. It is not medical, clinical, legal or financial advice and must not be used as a substitute for professional consultation or for decisions about an individual's care.

6. Availability

The portal is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. Access may be interrupted, restricted or withdrawn, and content may change without prior notice. Machine-readable endpoints may be rate-limited or relocated.

7. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Dr Stefan Buttigieg nor the DHIR or IDCU accepts liability for any loss or damage arising from use of, or reliance on, the content, including indirect or consequential loss.

8. Third-party links and services

Links to external sites — including the source directorates, EU vocabularies and the HealthDCAT-AP specification — are provided for reference. We are not responsible for their content or availability. Third-party services used to run the portal (hosting, authentication and AI) are listed in the Data protection policy.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Malta, and the courts of Malta have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

10. Changes to these terms

Updated terms take effect when published on this page; substantive changes are recorded in the portal version history.

11. Questions about these terms or the portal

Queries about these terms, the Cookie Policy, the Data Protection Policy or any other portal question should be addressed to Dr Stefan Buttigieg, Specialist in Public Health Medicine, at info@stefanbuttigieg.com.

Questions about the underlying survey data, methodology or source reports should be addressed to the publishing directorate: the Directorate for Health Information and Research, Ministry for Health, Malta, or the IDCU.