National Oral Health Plan 2015–2024: performance monitoring report

Proportion of people aged 18 years and older who smoke every day

Numerator
Estimated total number of adults (aged 18+ years) in the Australian population who smoke one or more cigarettes, roll-your-own cigarettes, cigars or pipes every day

Denominator
Total persons aged 18 years and over

Note, rates are age standardised to the 2001 Australian standard population for comparisons over time.

Low

National Health Survey (ABS)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics National Health Survey (NHS) is the primary source of smoking data. It is designed to collect a range of information about the health of Australians and be representative of the estimated resident population living in private dwellings in non-Very remote areas of Australia.

For the 2017–18 NHS cycle, the smoking questionnaire module was used in both the NHS and the 2017–18 Survey of Income and Housing (SIH) to produce a larger sample size for more accurate smoker status estimates. The pooled dataset is known as the National Health Survey and Survey of Income and Housing (NHIH) and will contain data items common to both NHS and SIH such as age, sex, country of birth and those from the smoking module.

Daily smoking
Respondents to the NHS that self-report smoking a tobacco product at least once per day. Survey data in the NHS is extrapolated to the Australian population living in private dwellings in non-Very remote areas of Australia using age and sex benchmarks to estimate the total number of adults who smoke every day..

Smoking products
Numerator includes tobacco smokers using the following tobacco products:
Manufactured cigarettes
Roll-your-own cigarettes
Cigars
Pipes

Other products
Chewing tobacco and smoking non-tobacco products are excluded from the numerator. Electronic cigarettes are also excluded in the ABS definition. However, it is unclear whether respondents have included use of these products when answering questions relating to tobacco use.