4704.0 - The Health and Welfare of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, Oct 2010

ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 19/12/2011 Final

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Contents >> Mortality >> Understanding the data quality issues

	MORTALITY: UNDERSTANDING THE DATA QUALITY ISSUES
	This article is part of a comprehensive series released as The Health and Welfare of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

OVERVIEW

The exact scale of difference between the mortality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous people is difficult to establish conclusively, due to quality issues with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths data. While it is considered likely that most deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are registered, a proportion of these deaths are not recorded as such.

Data presented in this article may therefore underestimate the level of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths and mortality in Australia. Caution should be exercised when interpreting data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people presented in this article, especially with regard to year-to-year changes.

In this article, detailed disaggregations of deaths data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are provided only for New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Some data for Western Australia is included in the Mortality datacube.

QUEENSLAND 2010 DATA

Care should be taken when interpreting mortality rates for Queensland due to recent changes in the timeliness of birth and death registrations. Queensland deaths data for 2010 have been adjusted to minimise the impact of late registration of deaths on mortality indicators. For more information see Registrations of Outstanding Deaths, Queensland, 2010 (Technical Note) from Deaths, Australia, 2010 (cat. no. 3302.0), released on 10 November 2010.

WESTERN AUSTRALIA 2007–2009 DATA

Due to over-reporting of Western Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths for 2007, 2008 and 2009, WA mortality data for these years (including aggregates of years and jurisdictions) are excluded from this analysis. Data including Western Australia outside this reference period can be found in the Mortality datacube.