Local Health Districts

Local Health Districts (LHDs) are health administrative areas constituted under Section 17 of the NSW Health Services Act 1997 which became effective from January 2011 and were initially called Local Health Networks.

There are 15 geographically-based LHDs (eight covering the Sydney metropolitan region and seven covering rural and regional NSW) and two specialist networks focusing on Children's and Paediatric Services and Forensic Mental Health. A third network operates across the public health services provided by three Sydney facilities operated by St Vincent's Health: these include St Vincent's Hospital and the Sacred Heart Hospice at Darlinghurst and St Joseph’s at Auburn.

LHDs replaced the former Area Health Services. Each LHD has its own budget, management and accountabilities. Geographically-based LHDs are overseen by Governing Boards. Please refer to the NSW Health website for a list of Local Health Districts and the membership of Boards.

Local Health Districts are:

Metropolitan NSW: Central Coast, Illawarra Shoalhaven, Nepean Blue Mountains, Northern Sydney, South Eastern Sydney, South Western Sydney, Sydney, Western Sydney.

Rural & regional NSW: Far West, Hunter New England, Mid North Coast, Murrumbidgee, Northern NSW, Southern NSW, Western NSW.

Methods used to adjust estimates for rare conditions analysed by Local Health District in HealthStats NSW

The term ‘small area’ refers to a sub-state geographical area with a small population. Data analysed for small areas may result in estimates that display considerable variability from year to year, particularly for rare conditions or events. Smoothing is a general term for statistical methods used to reduce the random variability of data in small populations. Examples of smoothing include rounding, moving averages, extending the period of time in which cases are counted or increasing the size of the areas. In addition, statistical smoothing can be used to adjust raw estimates in small areas by taking into account information from adjacent areas (local or spatial variability) and from the whole state (global or non-spatial variability).

In HealthStats NSW, the most frequently used smoothing technique for data presented by Local Health District is the aggregation of several years of data together followed by the calculation of a rolling average across the aggregated years. For some indicators, data for particular Local Health Districts may be suppressed due to very low numbers and privacy concerns. Please refer to Notes under the graphs or Methods tabs for confirmation of suppression and the smoothing technique used.

Local Health District population estimates used in HealthStats NSW

In HealthStats NSW, the total population used for each Local Health District when calculating age-standardised rates are the Estimated Resident Populations produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and projections produced by the NSW Department of Planning, Industry, and Environment. As sub-state projections based on the 2016 Census are not yet available, population projections for Local Health Districts (estimated population for 2017 and onwards) are based on Estimated Resident Populations produced by the ABS prior to the 2016 Census.

References

NSW Health. Local Health Districts and specialty networks. Available at https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/lhd/Pages/default.aspx