Alcohol and other drug treatment services in Australia annual report

For technical notes on the state and territory summaries refer to Technical notes - state and territory summaries.

Age

Age is calculated as at the start of the episode.

Data collection process

For most states and territories, the data provided for the national collection are a subset of a more detailed jurisdictional data set used for planning and policy. Figure A1 shows the processes involved in constructing the national data.

Figure A1: Alcohol and other drug treatment data collection flowchart

Drugs of concern

The AODTS NMDS contains data on drugs of concern that are coded using the ABS’s Australian Standard Classification of Drugs of Concern (ASCDC) (ABS 2011). In this report, these drugs are grouped (Table A1).

In this report, pharmaceutical drugs were grouped using 10 drug types, making up the pharmaceuticals group for the purposes of the analysis. These drugs correspond to the ASCDC codes and classifications (Table A2).

n.f.d—not further defined; n.e.c—not elsewhere classified.

Duration

Duration is calculated in whole days, and only for closed episodes.

Population rates

In this publication, crude rates were calculated using the ABS’s estimated resident population at the midpoint of the data range: that is, rates for 2020–21 data were calculated using the estimated resident population at 31 December 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting Australian Government closure of the international border from 20 March 2020, caused significant disruptions to the usual Australian population trends. This report uses Australian Estimated Resident Population (ERP) estimates that reflect these disruptions.

In the year July 2020 to June 2021, the overall population growth was much smaller than the years prior and in particular, there was a relatively large decline in the population of Victoria. ABS reporting indicates these were primarily due to net-negative international migration (National, state and territory population, June 2021 | Australian Bureau of Statistics (abs.gov.au).

Please be aware that this change in the usual population trends may complicate your interpretation of statistics calculated from these ERPs. For example, rates and proportions may be greater than in previous years due to decreases in the denominator (population size) of some sub-populations.

Reason for cessation

The AODTS NMDS contains data on the reason an episode ended (reason for cessation). In this report, these reasons are grouped (Table A3), but data for the individual end reasons are available in the online supplementary tables.

A different method was used for grouping end reasons in reports released before 2014, so trend comparisons across reports should be made with caution. It is possible to compare data at the individual end reasons using the supplementary tables.

Remoteness area

This report uses the ABS’s Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Remoteness Structure 2016 (ABS 2016b) to analyse the proportion of AOD treatment agencies by remoteness area. This structure allows areas that share common characteristics of remoteness to be classified into broad geographic regions of Australia. These areas are:

• Major cities
• Remote
• Inner regional
• Very remote
• Outer regional

The remoteness structure divides each state and territory into several regions based on their relative access to services.

Examples of urban centres in each remoteness area are:

• Major cities Canberra, Newcastle
• Inner regional Hobart, Bendigo
• Outer regional Cairns, Darwin
• Remote Katherine, Mount Isa
• Very remote Tennant Creek, Meekatharra.

For this report, the remoteness area of the agency was determined using the Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) of the agency. Not all SA2 codes fit neatly within a single remoteness category, and a ratio is applied to reapportion each SA2 to the applicable remoteness categories. As a result, it is possible that the number of agencies in a particular remoteness category is not a whole number. After rounding, this can result in there being ‘<0.5%’ agencies in a remoteness area, due to the agency’s SA2 partially crossing into the remoteness area.

The Australian Statistical Geography Standard ASGS has replaced the Australian Standard Geographical Classification 2006 (ABS 2006), which was used in previous reports to calculate remoteness areas. Therefore, remoteness data for 2011–12 and previous years are not comparable with those for 2012–13 and subsequent years.

Service sectors

From 2008–09, agencies funded by the Department of Health under the Non-Government Organisation Treatment Grants Program (NGOTGP) were classified as non‑government agencies. Before this, many of these agencies were classified as government agencies. As a result, trends in service sectors of agencies should be interpreted with caution.

Source of referral: diversion

Throughout Australia, there are programs that divert people who have been apprehended or sentenced for a minor drugs offence from the criminal justice system. Many of these diversions result in clients receiving drug treatment services, who have been referred to treatment agencies as part of a drug diversion program. Since the 1980s, Australian governments have supported programs aimed at diverting from the criminal justice system people who have been apprehended or sentenced with a minor drugs offence.

In Australia, drug diversion program come in two main forms:

• Police diversion occurs when an offence is first detected by a law enforcement officer. It usually applies for minor use or possession offences, often relating to cannabis, and can involve the offender being cautioned, receiving a fine and/or having to attend education or assessment sessions.
• Court diversion occurs after a charge is laid. It usually applies for offences where criminal behaviour was related to drug use (for example, burglary or public order offence). Bail-based programs generally involve assessment and treatment, while pre‑ and post-sentence programs (including drug courts) tend to involve intensive treatment and are aimed at repeat offenders.

Treatment

The number of closed treatment episodes for counselling as a main treatment type has remained the most common treatment type for all clients over all collection years. Fluctuations over time in closed treatment episodes for particular treatment types may be influenced by coding practices, increased funding or changes in treatment policies/ capacity to provide specialised alcohol and other drug treatment services, which may contribute to variation in treatment types over time.

Trends

Trend data may differ from data published in previous versions of Alcohol and other drug treatment services in Australia, due to data revisions.

Imputation methodology for AOD clients

From the inception of the AODTS NMDS, data have been collected only about treatment episodes provided by AOD treatment services. Data about the clients those episodes relate to have not been available at a national level. An SLK was introduced into the AODTS NMDS for the 2012–13 collection to enable the number of clients receiving treatment to be counted, while continuing to ensure the privacy of these individuals receiving treatment.

An imputation strategy for the collection was developed to correct for the impact of invalid or missing SLKs on the total number of clients. This strategy takes into account several factors relating to the number of episodes per client and makes assumptions relating to spread across agencies. It also takes into consideration the likelihood that an episode with a missing SLK relates to a client that has already been counted through other episodes with a valid SLK.

To ensure an accurate representation of the AODTS client population, imputation was applied to the 2012–13, 2013–14 and 2015–16 AODTS NMDS to account for the proportion of valid SLKs being less than 95% for these years. The national rate of valid SLKs for these years was largely affected by low proportions of valid SLKs in New South Wales.