Socioeconomic characteristics of NSW hospital users in 1998-99

With the ever increasing cost of providing hospital and other health services, it is vital to have an accurate understanding of the different health needs of various categories of hospital users - for example the rich versus the poor, or city versus bush dwellers. For this study the authors started with a 1998-99 person-based NSW hospitals dataset, and imputed onto this dataset from the 1996 Census, at the Collection District level, socioeconomic variables such as equivalent family income and an area-based index of socioeconomic disadvantage. In this paper the authors report on unique evidence from this combined dataset regarding the socioeconomic, demographic, distributional, health and spatial characteristics of those NSW residents who used NSW private or public hospital services in 1998-99. Questions addressed in the paper include: who benefited most/least that year from government funding to NSW hospitals - across socioeconomic classes, age, sex and geographic regions.