Use of hospitals and homelessness services by refugees and humanitarian entrants

The SDB contains migrants who entered Australia in or after 2000 on a permanent visa or a visa which is a pathway to a permanent visa.

Each record in the SDB has an associated visa subclass which identifies the specific visa granted. Visa subclasses were assigned to visa streams to identify whether the record was a permanent humanitarian entrant or another permanent migrant (skilled, family and other). See Table 1.1 for the visa subclass groupings for permanent humanitarian entrants and other permanent migrants used in these analyses.

The humanitarian entrant cohort for these analyses includes only those granted offshore humanitarian visas and excludes those were granted protection visas onshore.

The SDB is limited to permanent migrants who arrived on or after the year 2000, therefore the migration cohorts do not include any permanent migrants who arrived before 2000. This should be considered when interpreting the outcomes presented in this report.

There are several temporary visas that are included in the SDB. These are temporary visas with a clear pathway to permanent visas, for example people who arrive on a temporary partner visa while waiting for the permanent partner visa to be assessed. Medicare eligibility on these temporary visas varies depending on the visa subclass: some are Medicare eligible on the temporary visa, some are eligible if they have applied for a permanent visa, and some are not eligible until they are granted a permanent visa. These visa holders are only included in the cohort if they link to a record on the MCD.

Identifying presence in the reporting period

The reporting period for hospitalisation and emergency department presentation outcomes in these analyses is the 2016–17 to 2020–21 financial years. For homelessness data the reporting period is 2011–12 to 2021–22 financial years.

Whether a person was within the cohort in the reporting period was identified using the persons date of birth from the MCD, arrival year from the SDB and date of death from the NDI. Only month and year were provided for the date of birth, the day of the month was set to the first.

There is no information in the data to identify people who leave the country, and this may lead to an underestimation in rates due to people being included in the denominator despite not being in the country to access services.

For the hospitalisation and emergency department analyses, any events that occur prior to the person’s arrival date have been excluded from the numerator as these people will not be included in the denominator until the arrival date. The arrival date recorded in the SDB was the most recent date of arrival in Australia after the visa being granted for offshore visas and prior to the visa being granted for onshore visas. Therefore, exclusion of pre-arrival date events will only affect those who were previously in Australia on a temporary visa and exited the country before arriving on a permanent visa or a visa that lead to a permanent visa.

The SHS analyses includes all support periods recorded in the SHS in the reporting period.

Identifying state of residence

The state of residence used in these analyses was derived from the state recorded on the MCD on the 31^st of December of the financial year. If the state was missing in a given financial year the most recently recorded state was used.

Country of birth

The country of birth was as recorded on the SDB. This variable is not standardised to the Standard Australian Classification of Countries. Where a previously used name was recorded it was replaced with the most current name for the country (e.g. Burma to Myanmar, Zaire to the Democratic republic of Congo). Migrants with a birthplace listed as Sudan in the SDB may include migrants whose birth place is in the area that is now the country of South Sudan which gained independence in 2011. Therefore a birth place of Sudan may include South Sudanese migrants.