The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) is a major national agency established under the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Act 1987 as a corporate Commonwealth entity to provide reliable, regular and relevant information and statistics on Australia’s health and welfare.

We are committed to providing high quality, national data and analysis across the health, housing and community services sectors. This covers a wide range of areas, from health and welfare expenditure, hospitals, disease and injury, disability and mental health, to ageing, homelessness, and Indigenous health and welfare.

We value a positive, friendly, cooperative and productive workplace where people are treated with respect and courtesy, and diverse and unique attributes are recognised and valued. We are committed to providing flexibility in working arrangements to recognise the importance of balancing work commitments with family, caring and other personal commitments of employees outside of work.

The AIHW is committed to creating genuine opportunities for all, and encourages applications from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people(s), people with a disability and people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

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Summary:

Accurate and consistent recording of health diagnoses is a basic building block for measuring disease prevalence and a prerequisite to using integrated administrative data for population health monitoring.

For dementia, this requires consistent coding of dementia across multiple health, aged care and other data sets. Currently there are inconsistencies in data collection and recording that limit the ability to use existing data for accurate and reliable monitoring of dementia in the Australian population.

This project will seek to develop a Dementia National Best Practice Data Set, as a foundation for quality, comparable and consistent data collection, analysis and reporting on dementia in Australia.

The role will involve:

• Developing metadata related to dementia diagnosis, progression, treatment and management.
• Drafting papers to working groups, advisory groups and decision-making committees.
• Contributing to a draft report on the development of the Data Set Specification for review by the Australian Government Department of Health.

The successful applicant can expect this placement to provide:

• Active engagement with government and non-government stakeholders, including clinicians and dementia-related data experts, at national, jurisdictional and cross-AIHW levels.
• Exposure to a wide range of data sets from the health, ageing and disability sectors.
• Clear links between their work and dementia policy and program development.
• Tangible outcomes in the form of papers for decision-making (to working groups, national committees and government departments), publically available metadata, and published reporting products.

Download:

Developing a National Data Set Specification for Dementia