Burden of Disease - Background

Health services planning requires information regarding the health status of populations. Traditionally this information has been largely based on causes of death (mortality) and health service utilisation statistics such as hospital admissions. It has also more often been available at the national or state level, rather than the specific geographic area for which the planning is to be carried out, such as the local government area level in the case of Municipal Public Health planning, or combinations of these, for instance, Primary Care Partnerships, or Divisions of General Practice or Metropolitan Health Services. Health status information at the smaller geographic level is difficult to find, expensive to collect and often inaccurate or unreliable. 
The first Victorian Burden of Disease study (1996)  and the more recently completed study revision (2001), addressed the first of these issues by combining mortality based assessments with estimates of non-fatal diseases (morbidity data), as well as identifying major risk factors such as smoking, obesity and lack of physical exercise that contribute to the burden of disease and injury in the population.  This is a major improvement in the nature and scope of health status assessments of populations.
The second problem remaining for local planners was to access pertinent information on the relevant Local Government Area (LGA) population. Burden of disease estimates have now been produced twice for the 78 LGAs in Victoria. These LGAs can be aggregated into Alliances or Health Regions depending on the geographic unit being planned for.

These background notes explain how to interpret the small area estimates of burden of disease, and explain how they were calculated. Sincere acknowledgement is given to Dr Theo Vos and Stephen Begg of the University of Queensland for their vision, guidance and encouragement in the completion of this project.

For further background information about the Burden of Disease study see the publication below:

Background for users of BoD estimates for LGAs of Victoria

Contents

• Introduction
• Methods
• Quality of estimates
• Uses of the information
• Outputs 2001 Victorian Burden of disease Search estimates website

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Background for users of burden of disease estimates for LGAs of Victoria (130kb, pdf)

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