From the Director
Welcome to the first AIHW Access for 2013. In this issue we are focusing on the health and welfare of children and young people in Australia. But before I move on to that topic, as well as to some reflections on the AIHW in 2013, I would like to add my congratulations to the many already sent to one of our own young staff, Kathleen Jackson.
Kathleen has been accepted into the PhD program in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University in the USA, a very prestigious achievement.
Kathleen has worked at AIHW as part of our Indigenous cadetship program, which provides part-time employment while also allowing Kathleen to complete her honours thesis at the University of Newcastle. By the time you read this, she will have finished her cadetship with us and will be on her way to enjoying some Boston spring sunshine. You can read more about Kathleen and her research interests on page 14.In the meantime we are always keen to encourage more Indigenous students to join our Indigenous cadetship program. We benefit from the unique perspectives Indigenous cadets bring to our work, while they in turn gain valuable work experience as well as income support while completing university studies. If you are interested please email our human resources section at <hr@aihw.gov.au>.
Children and young people
Late last year I was interviewed for International Innovation, a web magazine based in Europe. The interview has been published in two parts, and is available at <http://www.research-europe.com/index.php/tag/australian-institute-of-health-and- welfare/>.
The questions were very wide-ranging, covering the Institute’s role and governance mechanisms, as well our statistical methods and findings, and their relevance to Australians. One specific question asked of me was to outline key findings from our fourth Young Australians: their health and wellbeing report, and discuss how the findings had influenced Australian policy.
The number one finding is that overall, the majority of young Australians (12–24 years) experience good health and wellbeing. Over 90 per cent of young Australians rate their health as good, very good or excellent.
On the other hand, over one-third of Australia’s young people are either overweight or obese, fewer than half meet recommended physical activity guidelines and very few consume the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables each day.
Youth mortality rates have halved in the last 20 years, largely through fewer road accident deaths; most young people are achieving national minimum standards for literacy and numeracy; three-quarters of students remained in school to Year 12, and over half of all 15–24 year olds were studying for a qualification. Also on the plus side, young people report strong support networks, which are associated with better physical and mental health.
The results overall are very encouraging, but with potential for further improvement. For example, rates of insulin-treated diabetes in young people have risen by more than 40 per cent over the last decade. Rising rates of sexually transmissible infections are a concern, particularly chlamydia, as are mental health issues, with many young people reporting anxiety or substance-use disorders or depression. Young people in remote areas have higher death rates and poorer educational outcomes, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people are more likely to be disadvantaged across most measures of health and welfare.
We believe our reports on children and young people have had a positive influence on policy. There are several initiatives being considered by governments to tackle childhood and youth obesity problems, including healthy eating campaigns, after-school physical activity programs and more exercise within school time. There are also activities under way to control the advertising of energy-dense foods to children and the availability of sugary drinks in school canteens. There are also several improvements to mental health policy in progress, to limit or reverse the disproportionate effects of mental illness on young people. These include headspace youth mental health centres and new early psychosis youth centres.
The AIHW in 2013
AIHW Director Mr David Kalisch (left) and Minister for Mental Health and Ageing, Hon Mark Butler at the Launch of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Dementia Care in Hospitals Report, 14 March 2013
Earlier this year Public Administration Today magazine gave me the opportunity to set out some of my thoughts about AIHW and how we are placed in 2013. Here is a very much abridged version of what I said.
The AIHW has very extensive and ever-expanding data holdings across the health, community services and housing sectors.
We have shown that there is great value in drawing together understandings across the health and welfare sectors, and we are unique in our ability to do this. For example we can analyse trends in particular diseases coupled with hospital performance, disability, ageing, drug and alcohol use, social housing, and the resourcing of these sectors. These interrelationships, essential for well-designed policy and services, can be missed in narrowly focused information reporting.
While the AIHW is formally a Commonwealth Government statutory agency, our Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act status, our 15-member management board, and extensive engagement with all governments and non- government health and welfare sector agencies, mean we truly operate as an independent national organisation.
We are required to be more entrepreneurial than many other government agencies. Our guaranteed appropriation is less than $16 million a year, and our external fee-for- service contracts, which currently total around $35 million a year, are not guaranteed—this places extraordinary challenges on us to make sure we deliver what our clients want in a reasonable time, to a high standard, at a value for money price.
The AIHW has a lean, efficient corporate infrastructure, with skilled and experienced staff. While this approach is ideal in all organisations that draw taxpayer funding, it is particularly relevant to us, given the extent to which we must compete for, and largely rely on, additional external funding.
Consistent with many other public service organisations, changes in our operating environment and developments in technology mean that we need to keep reforming ourselves. The 24/7 media and political cycle in particular has challenges for information providers such as the AIHW. The pressure for immediacy is at odds with the thorough processes of data collection, aggregation, supply, validation, analysis and dissemination.
Most important is the establishment and ongoing improvement of national data standards. AIHW’s effort over decades means we now have quite reasonable comparability of information across jurisdictions across the health and welfare sectors— but there is always more to be done.
For example, last year the AIHW worked with the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and many other key stakeholders, including all governments, to develop a more robust approach to urgency categorisation for elective surgery. At a minimum, this is critical for consistent COAG national reporting.
The AIHW has considerable professional expertise in data collation and data quality assurance. This includes identifying potential errors in supplied data, such as occurred in 2012 with emergency department information from the ACT.
AIHW is placing greater attention to improving the timeliness of our work while maintaining and if possible improving quality. We have developed a software program, ValidataTM, which automatically applies a large set of validation rules across supplied data. But rather than keep it to ourselves we are making this program available to our data suppliers in order to improve quality across the whole data supply chain, rather than only at the final point of national supply.
We have developed and adopted technologies that better enable us to analyse and present information in newer and smarter ways. And we are currently halfway through a two-year concentrated business transformation process to better manage our continually large number of complex projects and to enable staff to work across a range of different activities.
Overall, in 2013 we aim to deliver better quality services in reduced timeframes, constrain the cost of standard AIHW services to our external funders, and enable skilled AIHW staff to devote more attention to higher value-added analyses.
David Kalisch
Director (CEO)