Introduction
The Monthly Report on Adult Health for New South Wales provides information on health behaviours, health status, health services, and social capital, for people aged 16 years and over. It provides preliminary monthly trend data for persons, for a selected set of indicators, which is updated regularly.
The indicators in the monthly report are:
Health behaviours
More than 2 standard drinks on a day when consuming alcohol, influenza immunisation, pneumococcal immunisation, injury prevention (lives in home with a smoke alarm or detector), 2 or more serves of fruit a day, 5 or more serves of vegetables a day, usually consumes lower fat or skim milk, adequate physical activity, current smoking, smoke-free households, and smoke-free cars.
Health status
Excellent or very good or good self-rated health, current asthma, diabetes or high blood glucose, high or very high psychological distress, visited a dental professional in the last 12 months, overweight, obese, and overweight or obese.
Health services
Difficulties getting health care, emergency department presentations and care rating, hospital admissions and care rating, public dental service attendances, and community health centre attendances.
Social capital
Trust most people and visit neighbours.
These indicators are presented in graphical and tabular form. For each indicator, the report includes a line chart of trend in NSW since the first year of data collection. The line chart present actual and predicted prevalence estimates for persons. The predicted prevalence estimates were calculated using the FORECAST procedure in SAS version 9.1. The underlying model used in this procedure was the Holt exponential smoothing model, designed to use all previous prevalence estimates, which takes into account the increasing (or decreasing) trend in those prevalence estimates over time. In this forecasting model, prevalence estimates for later years are given more importance than prevalence estimates for earlier years.
The table below the chart presents the prevalence estimates for persons and includes the 95 per cent confidence intervals (CI). The 95 per cent confidence interval provides a range of values that should contain the actual value 95 per cent of the time. A wider confidence interval reflects less certainty in the estimate. If confidence intervals do not overlap then the observed estimates are significantly different. If confidence intervals overlap slightly the observed estimates may be significantly different but further testing needs to be done to establish that significance. The table also presents the forecast for persons for the next 12 months using the FORECAST procedure in SAS.
Acknowledgement
The following people need to be mentioned for their contribution to this report: Margo Barr, Lindy Fritsche and Matthew Gorringe for survey and questionnaire development; Margo Barr, Ray Ferguson and Michael Giffin for report development and coordination; Ray Ferguson, Frances Garden, Mazen Kassis, Scott Linton, David Steel and Baohui Yang for data analysis including forecasting.
| Source: | New South Wales Population Health Survey 2011 (HOIST). Centre for Epidemiology and Research, NSW Department of Health. |
| Print version: | Although this page can be printed directly from your web browser, a higher quality version is available as a PDF file that can be printed or viewed on screen. |
| Produced by: | Centre for Epidemiology and Research, Population Health Division, NSW Department of Health. |
| Last updated on: | 1 October 2011 |