Overview
This publication contains results from the Patient Experience Survey, a topic on the Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS) conducted throughout Australia from July 2022 to June 2023. The MPHS, undertaken each financial year by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), is a supplement to the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) and is designed to collect statistics for a number of small, self-contained topics.
The survey collected information from people about their experiences with selected aspects of the health system in the 12 months before their interview, including access and barriers to a range of health care services. Respondents were asked about:
- their experiences with health professionals
- the frequency of their visits
- waiting times
- self-assessed health status
- long-term health conditions
- private health insurance
- labour force characteristics
- education
- income
- other demographics.
Scope
The scope of the survey was restricted to people aged 15 years and over who were usual residents of private dwellings and excludes:
- members of the Australian permanent defence forces
- certain diplomatic personnel of overseas governments, customarily excluded from Census and Estimated Resident Population (ERP) counts
- overseas residents in Australia
- members of non-Australian defence forces (and their dependants)
- persons living in non-private dwellings such as hotels, university residences, boarding schools, hospitals, nursing homes, homes for people with disabilities, and prisons
- persons resident in the Indigenous Community Strata (ICS).
The scope for MPHS included households residing in urban, rural, remote and very remote parts of Australia, except the ICS.
Coverage
In the LFS, rules are applied which aim to ensure that each person in scope is associated with only one dwelling, and hence has only one chance of selection in the survey. See Labour Force, Australia for more detail.
Sample size
Information was collected from 25,934 fully responding persons. This includes 511 proxy interviews for people aged 15 to 17 years, where permission was not given by a parent or guardian for a personal interview, and 1,929 proxy interviews for people aged 18 years and over who were not capable of answering for themselves due to illness, injury or language problems.
Collection method
The survey is one of a number of small, self-contained topics on the MPHS.
Each month, one eighth of the dwellings in the LFS sample were rotated out of the survey and selected for the MPHS. After the LFS had been fully completed for each person in scope and coverage, a usual resident aged 15 years or over was selected at random (based on a computer algorithm) and asked the additional MPHS questions in a personal interview.
In the MPHS, if the randomly selected person was aged 15 to 17 years, permission was sought from a parent or guardian before conducting the interview. If permission was not given, the parent or guardian was asked the questions on behalf of the 15 to 17 year old (proxy interview). If the randomly selected person was aged 18 years and over but was not capable of answering for themselves, due to illness, injury or language problems, the person responsible for them could be asked the questions on their behalf (proxy interview).
Data were collected using Computer Assisted Interviewing (CAI), whereby responses were recorded directly onto an electronic questionnaire in a notebook computer, with interviews conducted over the telephone.