National Center for Health Statistics

The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is a U.S. government agency that provides statistical information to guide actions and policies to improve the public health of the American people. It is a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System. It is headquartered at University Town Center in Hyattsville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. The Marine Hospital Service, predecessor of the Public Health Service (PHS), began collecting data on communicable diseases and performing surveillance of the incidence and distribution of diseases due to an 1878 act of Congress. In 1893, another law provided for weekly collection of data from state and municipal authorities. The Division of Sanitary Reports and Statistics was established in 1899 as part of the initial establishment of internal divisions within the Marine Hospital Service. Separately, the Division of Public Health Methods was formed in 1937 within the National Institute of Health. In 1943, these two divisions were merged, retaining the name Division of Public Health Methods but being transferred into the Office of the Surgeon General. In 1946, the Division of Public Health Methods absorbed the Vital Statistics Division, which dated from 1903, from the Bureau of the Census in the Department of Commerce. The merged division was renamed the National Office of Vital Statistics. It was then transferred into the PHS Bureau of State Services in 1949. In 1960, the National Office of Vital Statistics and the National Health Survey merged to form the National Center for Health Statistics. The National Health Survey had been created within PHS in 1956 through the National Health Survey Act (); it was the successor to a seminal national health survey performed by the Works Progress Administration during 1935–1936, which had multiple supplemental studies carried out in the intervening decades.