National Healthcare Agreement: PI 23: Selected potentially avoidable GP-type presentations to emergency departments, 2011 QS
Data Quality Statement Attributes
Identifying and definitional attributes | |
Metadata item type: | Data Quality Statement |
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METEOR identifier: | 448113 |
Registration status: | Health, Superseded 04/12/2012 |
Data quality | |
Data quality statement summary: |
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Institutional environment: | The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has calculated this environment indicator. The Institute is an independent statutory authority within the Health and Ageing portfolio, which is accountable to the Parliament of Australia through the Minister. For further information see the AIHW website. The data were supplied to the Institute by State and Territory health authorities. The State and Territory health authorities received these data from public hospitals. States and territories use these data for service planning, monitoring and internal and public reporting. Hospitals may be required to provide data to states and territories through a variety of administrative arrangements, contractual requirements or legislation. |
Timeliness: | The reference period for this performance indicator is 2008-09 and 2009-10. |
Accessibility: | The AIHW provides a variety of products that draw upon the NNAPEDCD data. Published products available on the AIHW website include Australian hospital statistics, and associated Excel tables. Data are also included on the MyHospitals website. |
Interpretability: | Supporting information on the quality and use of the NNAPEDCD are published annually in Australian hospital statistics (Chapter 5 and technical appendixes), available in hard copy or on the AIHW website. Readers are advised to read caveat information to ensure appropriate interpretation of the performance indicator. Supporting information includes discussion of coverage that might affect interpretation of the published data. Metadata information for the NAPEDC NMDS are published in the AIHW’s online metadata repository — METeOR, and the National health data dictionary. |
Relevance: | The purpose of the NNAPEDCD is to collect information on the characteristics of emergency department care (including waiting times for care) for non-admitted patients registered for care in emergency departments in selected public hospitals that were classified as either peer group A (Principal referral and Specialist women’s and children’s hospitals) or B (Large hospitals). In 2008-09, hospitals in peer groups A and B provided approximately 69 per cent of all public hospital accident and emergency occasions of service. It is estimated that in 2009-10, hospitals in peer groups A and B provided a similar proportion of all public hospital accident and emergency occasions of service. The definition is considered a reasonable starting approximation of the population that should be receiving service in the primary care sector. The indicator includes only peer group A (Principal referral and Specialist women’s and children’s hospitals) and peer group B (Large hospitals). Analysis by State/Territory, remoteness and socioeconomic status is based on the reported area of usual residence of the patient. The SEIFA categories for socioeconomic status represent approximately the same proportion of the national population, but do not necessarily represent that proportion of the population in each state or territory (each SEIFA decile or quintile represents 10 per cent and 20 per cent respectively of the national population). The data presented here are not necessarily representative of the hospitals not included in the NNAPEDCD. Hospitals not included do not necessarily have emergency departments that are equivalent to those in hospitals in peer groups A and B. |
Accuracy: | For 2008-09, the coverage of the NNAPEDCD was 100 per cent in all jurisdictions for pubic hospitals in peer groups A and B. It is estimated that 2009-10 data has similar coverage, although final coverage cannot be calculated until 2009-10 NPHED data are available.
States and territories are primarily responsible for the quality of the data they provide. However, the Institute undertakes extensive validations on receipt of data. Data are checked for valid values, logical consistency and historical consistency. Where possible, data in individual data sets are checked with data from other data sets. Potential errors are queried with jurisdictions, and corrections and resubmissions may be made in response to these edit queries. The AIHW does not adjust data to account for possible data errors or missing or incorrect values. The quality of the data reported for Indigenous status in emergency departments has not been formally assessed for completeness; therefore, caution should be exercised when interpreting these data. As this indicator is limited to public hospitals which were classified in peer groups A and B, most of the data relates to hospitals within major cities. Consequently, the coverage may not include areas where the proportion of Indigenous Australians (compared with other Australians) may be higher than average. Similarly, disaggregation by socioeconomic status and remoteness should be interpreted with caution. Comparability across jurisdictions may be impacted by variation in the Cells have been suppressed to protect confidentiality (where the presentation could identify a patient or a single service provider) or where rates are likely to be highly volatile (for example, the denominator is very small). |
Coherence: | The information presented for this indicator is calculated using the same methodology as data published in Australian Hospital Statistics 2008-09, the National Healthcare Agreement: Baseline performance report 2008-09 and Australian hospital statistics 2009-10: emergency department care and elective surgery waiting times. As these data may not include hospitals that will be assigned to peer groups A or B for the first time in 2009-10 (and may include hospitals that will be assigned to a lower peer group), the results published here may differ to 2009-10 equivalent data published at a later date. |
Relational attributes | |
Related metadata references: | Supersedes National Healthcare Agreement: P23-Selected potentially avoidable GP-type presentations to emergency departments, 2010 QS Health, Superseded 08/06/2011 Has been superseded by National Healthcare Agreement: PI 23-Selected potentially avoidable GP-type presentations to emergency departments, 2012 QS Health, Superseded 14/01/2015 |
Indicators linked to this Data Quality statement: |