Document Type
Report
Publisher
Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet
Place of Publication
Mt Lawley, Western Australia
School
Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet
Abstract
This Overview has been prepared by the Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet as a part of our contributions to ‘closing the gap’ in health between Indigenous people and other Australians by making relevant, high quality knowledge and information easily accessible to policy makers, health service providers, program managers, clinicians, researchers, students and the general community.
The main purpose of the Overview is to provide a comprehensive summary of the most recent indicators of the health of Indigenous people.
Research for this Overview involved the collection, collation, and analysis of a wide range of relevant information, including both published and unpublished material. Sources include the full range of relevant literature, including journal articles and other relevant publications, the vast majority of which are accessible via the HealthInfoNet’s Australian Indigenous HealthBibliography. This bibliography, with more than more 20,000 entries, captures all relevant journal articles, books, book chapters and reports (including the ‘grey’ literature).
As well as the relevant journal literature, the HealthInfoNet’s overviews draw on important government reports, particularly those produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision (SCRGSP), and reports in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health performance framework series. These reports, prepared by the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council (AHMAC) in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2012, are accompanied by substantial detailed analyses, including analyses that are specific to WA, and accessible on the AIHW website. The HealthInfoNet’s overviews also draw on information from the main administrative data collections (such as the birth and death registration systems and the hospital inpatient collections) and national surveys. Information from these sources has been published mainly in government reports, particularly those produced by the ABS, the AIHW, and the SCRGSP.
Importantly, this Overview draws also on a wide variety of other information sources, including registers for specific diseases and other conditions, regional and local surveys, and numerous epidemiological and other studies examining particular diseases, conditions, and health determinants. Information from these sources is disseminated mainly through journals and similar periodicals, or in special reports.
A number of sections include the results of our own analyses of data obtained from a variety of sources. For example, estimates of some health conditions were made using notification data provided by the Epidemiology Branch at the WA Department of Health.The section on cancer benefitted from information provided by the WA Cancer Registry.
The initial sections of this Overview provide information about the context of Indigenous health, Indigenous population, and various measures of population health status. Most sections about specific health conditions comprise an introduction about the condition and evidence of the current burden of the condition among Indigenous people.
Access Rights
Free_to_read
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Australia License.
Comments
Anomie, MacRae, A., Burns, J., Poynton, M., D'Costa, B., Ride, K., Gray, C., Thomson, N., Hoareau, J., Trzesinski, A., Levitan, L.. (2013). Overview of the health of Indigenous people in Western Australia 2013. Perth, WA: Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet.
Available here.