Online Program


Establishing a Reporting Framework for Health Information for the Council of Australian Governments
*Paul Laurence Jelfs, Australian Bureau of Statistics 

Keywords: Indicators,Australia, Health, performance

The Council of Australian Governments comprises all State and Territory Government Premiers, Chief Ministers and the Commonwealth Government's Prime Minister. This body establishes high level national agreements for the areas of health, housing and homelessness, Indigenous, disability and education. These agreements establish priority areas for policy and program development and represent a significant flow of funding between the Commonwealth and States based on signing up to the agreements and performance against benchmarks. The Australian Bureau of Statistics together with a number of other specialised subject matter information agencies, have been developing the reporting framework to establish current baseline information, establish State and Territory and sub population analyses and plan future data developments. This work has involved significant developmental work to establish indicators, assess and select key data sets, establish technical approaches to managing data and to establish data quality statements surrounding the indicators. This presentation will examine case studies of the development of 70 health indicators from the health care agreement and the 7 indicators from the preventative health agreement - examining their development, application, problems, governance, further development and their role as a funding decision tool. This reporting framework is currently the largest single national effort to assess progress in these key priority areas.