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ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION

This publication presents details from the 2012-13 Private Health Establishments Collection (PHEC). It is the only comprehensive statistical collection conducted in Australia focusing on the private hospital sector. The collection covers:

• private acute and psychiatric hospitals in Australia, licensed by state and territory health authorities, and
• free-standing day hospital facilities (day surgeries) approved by the Australian Government Department of Health for the purpose of health insurance benefits.

• facilities (beds available, special units),
• activities (patient throughput, days of hospitalisation provided, bed occupancy rates),
• patients (types of admitted patients, outpatients and procedures performed), and
• staffing and finances.

IN THIS ISSUE

This publication presents details from the 2012-13 national census of private hospitals. Three categories of private hospitals are identified: Acute hospitals, Psychiatric hospitals and Free-standing day hospital facilities. Within this publication, data for acute and psychiatric hospitals are published together in the same chapter.

There are relatively few psychiatric hospitals and some of these are owned by the same parent company. To maintain the confidentiality of their data, psychiatric hospitals are combined with acute hospitals in most tables in this publication. Any differences between the data presented in this publication and the data shown in other reports on private hospital activity are due to differences in scope and coverage, relative completeness of the data sources and differing error resolution procedures.

The Private Health Establishments Collection was not conducted for the 2007-08 reference period due to ABS budgetary constraints. This represented a break in the time series for the collection.

Gross and net capital expenditure was not published for 2011-12. A number of factors, including the introduction of an electronic form, highlighted potential quality issues with historical reporting of capital expenditure. An analysis was made on the quality of those data items for the last several years. As a result, some problems were found with the quality of the 2010-11 gross capital expenditure caused mainly by incorrect reporting and some problems with the capital expenditure estimates for non-responding units. As the quality issues were not as serious as previously expected, it was decided to re-release selected 2010-2011 capital expenditure data and release selected 2011-12 capital expenditure data with 4390.0 - Private Hospitals, Australia, 2012-13.

The additional information is provided in a graph of Gross capital expenditure: 2008-09 to 2012-13 (following TABLE 1.1: PRIVATE HOSPITALS, Australia—2012-13) and in TABLE 2.2 PRIVATE ACUTE AND PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS, Australia—Selected years, TABLE 2.18 PRIVATE ACUTE AND PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITALS Gross Capital Expenditure —State and territories—Selected years, TABLE 3.2 PRIVATE FREE-STANDING DAY HOSPITAL FACILITIES, Australia—Selected years, and TABLE 3.10 PRIVATE FREE-STANDING DAY HOSPITALS Gross Capital Expenditure —State and territories—Selected years

See Explanatory Note 40 for further information.