The purpose of the NMDS for Admitted patient care is to collect information about care provided to admitted patients in Australian hospitals. The scope of the NMDS is episodes of care for admitted patients in all public and private acute and psychiatric hospitals, free standing day hospital facilities and alcohol and drug treatment centres in Australia. Hospitals operated by the Australian Defence Force, corrections authorities and in Australia's off-shore territories may also be included. Hospitals specialising in dental, ophthalmic aids and other specialised acute medical or surgical care are included. Cells have been suppressed to protect confidentiality (where the numerator is less than 5 or would identify a single service provider), where rates are highly volatile (i.e. the denominator is very small), or data quality is known to be of insufficient quality (for example, where Indigenous identification rates are low). Separations with care types of Newborn episodes that did not include qualified days, and records for Hospital boarders and Posthumous organ procurement have been excluded as these activities are not considered to be admitted patient care. This is consistent with the publication of all hospital separation data by the AIHW. Data are a count of hospital separations (episodes of admitted patient care, which can be a total hospital stay or a portion of a hospital stay beginning or ending in a change of type of care) and not patients. Patients who separated from hospital more than once in the year will be counted more than once in the data set. While the NHMD is appropriate for the information being gathered and provides all relevant data elements of interest for this indicator, identification of Indigenous separations in the NHMD is not complete and varies by state/territory. Therefore jurisdictional comparisons of Indigenous separation rates should not be made for this indicator. Data are analysed by state/territory of usual residence of the patient. The numerator and denominator for the calculation of rates for this indicator come from different sources (numerator from the NHMD and denominator from ABS population data). While population data are adjusted for undercount and missing responses to the Indigenous status question, data from the NHMD are not. This, along with changing levels of Indigenous identification over time and across jurisdictions in both the numerator and denominator may affect the accuracy of compiling a consistent time series. Hospital separations with a ‘not stated/inadequately described’ Indigenous status have been combined with hospital separations for ‘non-Indigenous Australians’ and have been reported under the category ‘Other Australians’. This is because data systems of certain jurisdictions do not accommodate a category for ‘not stated/inadequately described’ and an assessment of patient characteristics indicates that separations with this category of Indigenous status show greater similarities with the non-Indigenous category than with the Indigenous category for most patient characteristics examined (AIHW 2005). |