Data definitions

Introduction

The health of Queenslanders: Report of the Chief Health Officer Queensland was released for the first time in 2006. Past versions are available from the Queensland Government’s Publications Portal website. Over time, health condition definitions are refined as new information becomes available or to align with definitions used in other sources. New health conditions may also be added or removed.

This page summarises the changes from the most recent release in 2023, as well as the definitions used in this release. Where data definitions changed, the entire time series was updated where possible. When updating the time series was not possible, the entire time series is displayed but trend analysis was limited to comparable years of data.

Hospitalisations

Unless otherwise stated, hospitalisation data (also known as hospital separations or admitted patient episodes of care) were sourced from the Queensland Hospital Admitted Patient Data Collection (QHAPDC), Queensland Health. QHAPDC forms a part of the National Hospital Morbidity Database. The QHAPDC is episode based, meaning that multiple episodes from a single person will be counted in a reporting period. Separations from interstate residents, public psychiatric hospitals, and those flagged as unqualified newborns, organ donors or boarders are excluded. Please see the Data sources page in this report under About this report for additional information.

Changes from the previous release

In addition to the changes in the table below, the following broader changes to the data collection or condition definitions were:

• Previously, records from 47 Primary Health Care Centres and Outpatient clinics, which ceased to be on the Commonwealth declared hospital list from July 2014, and thus ceased to report to QHAPDC, were excluded for reporting for the periods prior. From this publication, records from these facilities are no longer excluded.
• In the 2023 release of this report, hospitalisations for stroke excluded episodes of care where care type was rehabilitation. This accounted for the broken time series resulting from changes in the Australian Coding Standards from July 2015. For more consistent extraction criteria across health conditions, this exclusion was no longer applied in this release.

Table 1 summarises the changes made to the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification (ICD-10-AM) to define each condition.

Table 1: Summary of ICD-10-AM codes used to define conditions for hospitalisations

^{PD = principal diagnosis}

Mortality

Mortality data in this report were sourced from various reports and publications. Below are relevant for data prepared using the Cause of Death Unit Record File, Australian Coordinating Registry.

The Cause of Death Unit Record File are managed by the Australian Coordinating Registry. Unless otherwise stated, data are presented by year of death, rather than year of registration and are subject to change. Data excludes deaths where the Statistical Local Area or the Statistical Area Level 2 of place of usual residence were recorded as overseas. Data for remoteness and SEIFA excludes records that could not be clearly mapped to an Australian Statistical Geography Standard version.

Changes from the previous report

For mortality data sourced from the Australian Coordinating Registry, deaths of Queensland residents registered outside of Queensland were excluded due to data access limitations.

Table 2 summarises the changes made to the International Classification of Disease 10th Revision (ICD-10) to define each condition.

Table 2: Summary of ICD-10 codes used to define conditions for mortality

^{UCoD = Underlying cause of death}

Perinatal

Unless otherwise stated, perinatal data presented in this report were sourced from the Queensland Perinatal Data Collection, Queensland Health. Queensland Perinatal Data Collection forms a part of the National Perinatal Data Collection, and is a population-based data collection on pregnancy and childbirth. The scope of the Queensland Perinatal Data Collection slightly differs to the National Perinatal Data Collection, and may not match exactly to the nationally reported figures.

For the data presented in this report, data were restricted to mothers who usually resided in Queensland, and data for interstate women who gave birth in Queensland were excluded.

Further for individual indicators:

• Low birth weight, babies of unknown birth weight and those who were stillborn were excluded.
• Pre-term births, babies of unknown gestation were excluded.
• 5 or more antenatal visits indicator, women who attended an unknown or unspecified number of antenatal visits, or gave birth at less than 32 weeks gestation were excluded.
• Obese mothers, women with unknown body mass index were excluded.
• Maternal smoking, women with unknown smoking status were excluded.

Communicable diseases

Unless otherwise stated, data for communicable diseases presented in this report were sourced from the Notifiable Conditions Register (also known as Notifiable Conditions System; NOCS), Queensland Health. Further information about the register can be found on the Queensland Health website.

Table 3: Case definitions for reported communicable diseases (excluding acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease)

Table 4: Case definitions for acute rheumatic fever

Table 5: Case definitions for rheumatic heart disease

More refinement may take place in the future releases of the report.