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Abstract:
Australians generally have good health and an effective health system. How do we know this? We use a range of measures, such as life expectancy, mortality and morbidity, to monitor Australia’s health over time and to compare it with that of other countries. For instance, we use the Australian Health Performance Framework to assess the health of our population and the performance of our health system. Since 1988, Australia’s health has reported biennially on national indicators across the domains of health status, determinants of health, and the health system. Trend assessment for indicators across these three domains show mixed results:• We have seen some favourable trends in the health status domain, including a decline in the incidence rate of heart attacks, bowel cancer and the prevalence of severe or profound core activity limitation. However, there have been unfavourable trends too: hospitalisations for injury and poisoning have been increasing.• The proportion of adults who are daily smokers, who are at risk from long-term harm from alcohol and who have an educational attainment of a non-school qualification or above have all been trending favourably over the last 10 years. However, not all news in the determinants of health domain is positive: the proportion of people who are obese and overweight has been increasing over the past 20 years.• Assessment of the health system domain shows favourable progress for a number of indicators, including immunisation rates for 1- and 5-year-olds and potentially avoidable deaths. There has been no change over the last 10 years in some measures, such as wait times for emergency departments, however, the wait time for elective surgery has increased (an unfavourable trend).
