Appendix A: Data sources
This report uses the National Health Data Hub (NHDH) – formerly the National Integrated Health Services Information (NIHSI) analytical asset. The NHDH comprises de-identified and enduring health and welfare data from state and territory, Commonwealth and non-government data sources. Within this broader data asset, the National Aged Care Data Asset (NACDA) functions as a specialised subset focused on person-level aged care service data – such as home care, residential care, and eligibility assessments.
The NHDH brings together hospital data on admitted patient care services, emergency department services and outpatient services for all states and territories – with the exception of Western Australia (WA) and the Northern Territory (NT). It also includes various Commonwealth and non-government datasets relating to pharmaceuticals, health utilisation, aged care, deaths, disability, intensive care and immunisation information.
This report used NHDH data to 2021–22, as these data were the latest available and most complete at the time of analysis and drafting.
The NHDH datasets used were:
- National Death Index (NDI) – date and cause of death
- aged care services – people living in residential aged care, people using home care (through Home Care Packages Program) and people using residential respite care
- admitted patient care – palliative care-related hospitalisations in public hospitals and unplanned hospital admissions in public hospitals
- emergency department care – emergency department presentations in public hospitals
- non-admitted patient (outpatient) care – outpatient clinics for palliative care consultations in public hospitals
- Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) – Medicare-subsidised palliative care services.
For further technical details on how each of these datasets were used in the analysis see Appendix C.
Data limitations
Due to data availability and limitations, the NHDH does not capture all palliative care activity in Australia. For example:
- Public hospital data (admitted patient care, emergency department care, non-admitted patient care) is not available for all jurisdictions. At the time of analysis, WA and NT did not provide hospital data for inclusion in the NHDH. To ensure accurate comparisons, people residing in WA and the NT were excluded from analysis across all datasets (deaths, aged care, MBS, hospitals) for this report.
- Private hospital (admitted patient care) data is not available for all jurisdictions. Private hospitals were omitted from the analysis because complete data were only available for Queensland in the observation period.
- Patients in specialised palliative care units or hospices in private hospitals/facilities are not included. Note, while patients in specialised palliative care units/hospices within public hospitals are included in the analysis it is not possible to identify in the data whether they received care.
- Not all settings or services providing care to people with life-limiting illnesses, such as community health and allied health (for example, care provided in the home, or by ambulance, or disability services) are captured through MBS items.