ABSTRACT
Planners need to be able to manage and use both qualitative and quantitative data in the course of assessing health status and health needs, analysing current patterns of service utilisation, and justifying and modelling the impact of any proposed change. Sources of such data include the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, state Health Departments, and local or regional health authorities. This chapter outlines health-related data sources and issues, and discusses methods for turning data into information. Available demographic and socioeconomic data from the ABS that might be useful include data on education, disability, housing, income, literacy, employment and unemployment patterns, and regional labour force statistics. For example, the ABS Index of Social Disadvantage provides comparative information on socioeconomic data by geographic region. Descriptive statistics for health planning are often best presented graphically using methods such as frequency distributions, histograms, box plots and bar charts.
