Aggregating and Integrating Data on Health Outcomes Associated with Bushfires at a National Scale

The Challenge

The 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires in Australia demonstrated the importance of developing relevant data assets to inform effective prevention, adaptation and disaster response strategies relevant to human health and to mitigate the costs to human life. There are challenges in producing these assets for data custodians, who wish to ensure that data governance, privacy, and confidentiality processes are appropriately followed. Additionally, issues around access also exist for researchers and policy makers, who require timely access to spatially relevant data.

The Approach

This project:

• identified bushfire-related health service use of interest to policy makers and the research community. 
• identified data sources available and the level of temporal and spatial availability appropriate for reporting the identified health service use, and investigated the feasibility of alternative techniques that are appropriate to meet potential user needs (e.g. data modelling for smaller geographic areas).
• produced the identified data asset within current privacy, confidentiality, and data governance frameworks, and made it available to researchers.

The Partners

• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW)
• ARDC
• Frontier SI (Australian Environmental Health)
• Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
• Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Research (CAR)

Further Resources

• View the recording and slides (DC009) of a presentation on the project by Vanessa Prescott, AIHW at the November 2023 Bushfire Data Challenges Forum.