Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In late July, I was invited to a lecture at UWA. It had an intriguing title and I thought I would rock on down. The title was 'Health, political arithmetic and public accountability: bringing down the great Commonwealth-state data divide'. Now, I did not expect to be immensely entertained, but I thought it would be worth while and that as part of my duty I should listen to an argument about the political arithmetic involved in health care, because we know what a massive difficulty it is for both Commonwealth and state governments to manage the growing healthcare budget. But I have to say I left that lecture absolutely amazed that such complete and utter insanity could prevail in Commonwealth-state relationships.

The lecture was in fact a valedictory lecture from Professor D'Arcy Holman, a fabulous epidemiologist who has given over three decades of service to Western Australia. Professor Holman, along with other luminaries like Professor Fiona Stanley, really have pioneered data linkage in Western Australia.

They started this in the 1970s and went to a new level in 1995 where they were able to connect all the available health and related information for the WA population in such a way that enabled them to deeply and utterly penetrate this data. Professor Holman says:

Data linkage uses a combination of computers and protocols to create anonymous links between pre-existing health data-bases.

The links mean that the journeys of individuals through the health system can be followed anonymously over many years and thus their risk factors for major diseases, and the use and outcomes of health services can be evaluated using anonymous information. It was once said that putting WADLS in the hands of an epidemiologist is like putting a particle accelerator in the hands of a physicist; both of them cause a paradigm shift and open up a new era of knowledge.

He went on to set out the various insights they had been able to develop through using this data. They then pointed to the great data divide and said that in Australia, unfortunately, data is divided between two different jurisdictions. They have the Great Wall of China separating the two. The state covers date in relation to hospitals—births, deaths, mental health, cancer, birth defects et cetera—whereas the Commonwealth uses the data on GPs, specialists, diagnostic tests, medicine and aged care. Unfortunately, the general stance of the Commonwealth to WA has been that they would not allow their data to be used. So we could not link up the data we had from hospitals, the data we had of GP visits, the data we had of what drugs were being prescribed and what the use was.

Professor Holman then set out a number of very graphic and powerful examples of how using the WA data had led them to a particular result. Why was it, for example, that schizophrenics were dying at such alarming rate from heart disease? They had presumed from their data that perhaps people with mental illness did not access health services. Once they got a very small window of opportunity when the Commonwealth came on board they were then able to analyse the data and realised that that was not the cause at all. In fact, people with schizophrenia were attending health services more regularly than the general population. The problem was that they were not being prescribed statins. They were barking up the wrong tree. Until they had access to this data they were not able to make really profound discoveries about how we can get better use out of our health services.

This is an absolute disgrace and the Commonwealth bureaucracy must be made to come on board and share this important data for the benefit of all Australians.