Around 55 million non-admitted patient care services events were provided
In 2021–22:
- 55.4 million non-admitted patient care service events were provided in public hospitals
- around 2 in 5 (38%) service events were provided in Allied health and/or clinical nurse specialist intervention clinics (20.8 million service events), including 2.4 million service events provided by midwifery and maternity clinics
- around 1 in 4 (23%) service events were provided in Procedural clinics (12.9 million service events)
- 9 in 10 non-admitted service events (89%) were funded by sources categorised as Other funding (e.g. funding source was reported as Health service budget)
- 1 in 10 (11%) service events were funded through the Medicare Benefits Scheme, and less than 1% were funded by either the Department of Veterans’ Affairs or Compensable sources.
Changes over time
Over the last five years to 2021–22:
- reported non-admitted patient care service events increased from 38.9 million to 55.4 million
- service events provided by Procedural clinics increased from 3.13 million to 12.9 million.
Who received non-admitted patient services?
Of the 44.5 million episode-level service events reported in 2021–22:
- over 1 in 2 (54%) service events were provided to females (as identified in the data)
- over half were for people aged 45 and over (51%)
- 1 in 20 (5.1%) service events were provided to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Australians
- 64% were for people living in Major cities and 2 in 10 (19%) were for people living in Inner regional areas
- 1 in 5 (21%) of service events were provided to people living in the lowest socioeconomic areas.
Where do I find more information?
More information on these data are available in the Non-admitted patient care 2021–22 data tables.
The non-admitted patient care data collections have information about services provided to non-admitted patients in Australian public hospitals, including the types of services provided, the types of clinics in which services take place, the users of services and the funding of services.
These data collections exclude non-admitted patient services provided during emergency department care and to admitted patients, as well as service events that deliver non-clinical care (e.g. in-home maintenance and cleaning).
Definitions of the terms used in this section are available in the Glossary.
Non-admitted patient care data collections
Non-admitted patient care data encompasses:
- clinic-level data—which is based on data in the National Non-admitted Patient Care Aggregate Database (NNAPC(agg)D), and includes information on:
- the type of outpatient clinic
- individual and group service events
- funding source of service events
- whether the service involved care from multiple health care providers
- episode-level data—which is based on data in the National Non-admitted Patient Database (NNAP(el)D), and includes information on:
- selected patient characteristics
- service delivery mode and setting
- type of care provided
- additional information that is also provided as part of clinic-level data.
In 2021–22, 80% of data provided to the non-admitted patient care data collections was episode-level data, and the aim is for the collection to eventually only report on episode-level data.
Clinic-level data are primarily used to report on 'total service events'. Where clinic-level data were unavailable, episode-level data were used to supplement the NNAPC(agg)D which enabled us to report on all non-admitted patient care services in the reporting year.
For the NNAP(el)D, counts represent each service event, not each patient. Therefore, patients who receive more than one non-admitted patient service event in the reporting period will have more than one record in the NNAP(el)D. Due to the changing scope of the Non-admitted patient care data collections, 2021–22 data are not comparable with previous reporting years and no time series data are provided.
Technical specifications for these collections can be found in the About the data section or on the METEOR website.