The NSW Population Health Survey is a telephone survey on the health and wellbeing of the NSW population, and serves as a primary source of information on a range of fundamental measures of public health.
The survey provides critical data to Government, the public and media on topics ranging from childhood obesity, smoking and alcohol consumption, through to issues like mental illness, illicit drug use and electronic cigarette use. Data from the Survey is published via HealthStats NSW, and where relevant, via the NSW Report of the Chief Health Officer Series, with reporting infrastructure created using methods that follow a reproducible research design philosophy. Data is made available in unit record form to individuals within the NSW Health System who have access to a state wide data warehouse called SAPHaRI, with data routinely disclosed in de-identified unit record format to researchers for their own projects.
This presentation describes key design, methodological and operational changes to the survey, their impact on the data and how those changes have affected the use of data and long term trends in health behaviours. Further, the presentation will also highlight some of the key challenges that the Survey faces and how those challenges are currently being met. These challenges include comparability of data across different surveys, and dealing with discordant findings across different surveys.
In addition, this presentation will highlight a few case studies on how certain design changes led to unexpected secondary uses of the data.