Backgound
Refugees and humanitarian entrants’ health outcomes in Australia can be severely impacted by their experiences and health challenges prior to arriving in Australia. They are a subset of a group of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, who have been identified as a population of interest across the health sector, including in several key Australian Government strategies such as the National Women’s Health Strategy 2020–2030 (Department of Health and Aged Care 2019a), National Men’s Health Strategy 2020–2030 (Department of Health and Aged Care 2019b) and National Action Plan for the Health of Children and Young People 2020–2030 (Department of Health and Aged Care 2019c).
While data are routinely collected on the health and welfare outcomes of the general Australian population, there is no demographic information to identify the refugee and humanitarian population in national health and welfare data sets. As a result, there is limited information on refugees and humanitarian entrants’ health status and outcomes and changes over time.
This report builds on AIHW’s earlier report Health of refugees and humanitarian entrants in Australia which examined the health service use, medication dispensing patterns, health status and mortality of refugees and humanitarian entrants. This second report examines data on refugees and humanitarian entrants who arrived in Australia from 2000 to 2020 and their hospital admissions and emergency department presentations between 2016–2017 and 2020–2021, and use of specialist homelessness services between 2011–12 and 2020–2021. Hospital admission and emergency department analyses in humanitarian entrants and other permanent migrants does not include data from hospitals in Western Australia or the Northern Territory due to these analyses using pre-existing linkage infrastructure (which does not contain hospital data for these jurisdictions) to create the Refugee health linked data set.
For details of the data sources, who is included in the data, the linkage strategy, and data gaps, please see Profile of the study cohort and the Technical notes.
Department of Health and Aged Care (2019a) National Women’s Health Strategy 2020–2030, Australian Government, accessed 19 June 2024.
Department of Health and Aged Care (2019b) National Men’s Health Strategy 2020–2030, Australian Government, accessed 19 June 2024.
Department of Health and Aged Care (2019c) National Action Plan for the Health of Children and Young People 2020–2030, Australian Government, accessed 19 June 2024.