Report of the New South Wales Chief Health Officer	Table of contents On this page: Print version
	Foreword

This is the sixth edition of the report: Health of the People of NSW-Report of the Chief Health Officer. The report gives a comprehensive picture of health in New South Wales, Australia, which will inform policy and planning for population health programs in our state.

Population health programs aim to promote health, create healthy environments, enable individuals and communities to make healthy choices, and reduce differences in health among population groups. These programs focus on identifying health risks and developing ways to eliminate or reduce exposure to these risks. Population health programs provide opportunities not only to improve health but also, through prevention, to reduce the demand for acute services, such as emergency department services and inpatient care. Nations across the world are renewing their commitment to population health approaches, in recognition of the likely health system costs of population ageing and chronic disease, and the potential impacts of emerging diseases such as SARS and avian influenza.

This sixth edition of the report features new maps of population and health outcomes by local government area, including population change between 2005 and 2025, smoking in pregnancy, and avoidable hospitalisations; inclusion of projections to 2015 for hospitalisations and deaths; inclusion of population pyramids for each local government area for 2005 and 2025; inclusion of indicators by NSW Divisions of General Practice; inclusion of data on childhood obesity for the first time; inclusion of new data on burden of disease, including the relative burden of 14 health risk factors; enhancements to the Diabetes chapter including comparisons of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and diabetes complications; inclusion of long-term trends in influenza and pneumonia deaths and hospitalisations; and enhancements to the Aboriginal Health chapter, including immunisation of Aboriginal infants and expenditure on Aboriginal health programs.

Some of the public health successes reported in this edition are: Life expectancy at birth continues to increase now 78.9 years for males and 83.7 years for females; Immunisation rates in Aboriginal infants have increased to 88%; Smoking rates continue to fall in both adults (20%) and teenagers (9%); Cardiovascular disease death rates continue to decline to 39% of all deaths; Cancer death rates continue to fall and cancer survival continues to increase with around 63% of people diagnosed with cancer in NSW are alive five years later; Injury and poisoning death and hospitalisation rates continue to decrease; and Illicit drug and alcohol use in teenagers continues to fall.

However there are still improvements that need to be made including: Obesity and overweight rates continue to increase with more that 50% of the population classified as overweight or obese; Fall injury rates continue to increase in people aged 65 years and over; Diabetes prevalence continues to increase (now 8% in males and 7% in females); Sexually transmitted infections are on the increase; and there is a widening gap between the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups, and between health in urban, rural and remote populations in many health indicators.

I am delighted to see this evolution in the report, and applaud the technical innovation, ingenuity and hard work that has contributed to its production. New information in this report has been developed to support emerging bodies of work for NSW Health including Healthy People 2010: The population health strategy for New South Wales, Fit for the Future - the futures planning initiative, the State Health Plan 2006-2010, the NSW Health contribution to the NSW State Plan - A New Direction, and the NSW contribution to the Australian Better Health Initiative.

I am keen to further develop and strengthen links between epidemiological findings, such as those presented in this report, and their application in health policy and planning. To that end, I will be delighted to receive feedback from you about how you used this report, and how future editions can be enhanced.

Dr Denise Robinson

Deputy Director-General, Population Health and Chief Health Officer

December, 2006.

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