National hospital morbidity data collection

Recent releases

Mental health services in Australia 2006-07 (27 August 2009) (media release and publication)

Estimating the impact of selected National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (NHHRC) reforms on health care expenditure, 2003 to 2033 (5 August 2009) (publication)

Australian hospital statistics 2007-08 (10 June 2009) (media release and publication)

Popular titles

Australia's welfare 2009

Australia's health 2008

National hospital morbidity database (NHMD)

The NHMD is compiled from data supplied by the state and territory health authorities. It is a collection of electronic confidentialised summary records for separations (that is, episodes of care) in public and private hospitals in Australia. Data are held for the years 1993-94 to 2007-08.
Some of the information available in the NHMD is presented through interactive data tables. They contain information for:
- Principal Diagnosis, 1993-94 to 2007-08
- Diagnosis Related Group, 1997-98 to 2007-08
- Procedure, 2000-01 to 2007-08
For information on the National Hospital Morbidity Data Collection and Data request service visit the Hospital data.
The National health data dictionary definitions form the basis of the database, ensuring a high standard of data comparability.
Diagnoses, procedures and external causes of injury are recorded using the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and related Health Problems, Tenth revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM). For further information on the version used for each collection year see the ICD Coded Data Fact Sheet (183KB DOC)
Almost all hospitals in Australia are included in the database: public acute and public psychiatric hospitals, private acute and psychiatric hospitals, and private free standing day hospital facilities. The total number of records for 2007-08 was 7.9 million.

Example of data sourced from the NHMD

The following hospital separations figure was taken from Australian hospital statistics 2007-08, Chapter 8, figure 1, page 186.

Notes

Separations for which the care type was reported as Newborn with no qualified days, and records for Hospital boarders and Posthumous organ procurement have been excluded.
Separations per 1,000 population for 'Other males' and 'Other females' include separations for which Indigenous status was 'Not reported'.
The figure includes data for New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory (public hospitals only), for which the quality of Indigenous identification is considered acceptable for the purposes of analysis. Caution should be used in the interpretation of these data due to jurisdictional differences in data quality.
The figure contains crude rates based on 30 June 2006 estimated resident populations.

Figure 8.1: Separations per 1,000 population, by age group, sex and reported Indigenous state, all hospitals, selected states and territories, 2007-08

For more examples of NHMD data, please see Hospitals at a glance.