Environmental Health Critical Data Needs Analysis

The Challenge

Environmental health (EH) is a data-driven research field that quantitates human health consequences of environmental hazards, their management and related government policies. To maximise the opportunities for society, researchers and policymakers need access to comprehensive and coherent data infrastructure with data assets that are findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible (FAIR).

The Response

The Environmental Health Critical Data Needs Analysis project is a proposed national initiative led by the Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Research Network (administered by the University of Canberra) in partnership with the ARDC and the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW). This initiative aims to understand and document the administrative health and socioeconomic data infrastructure needed in Australia to investigate quantitative relationships between environmental exposures and human health outcomes.

The project will enhance researchers’ and policymakers’ understanding of the national administrative data infrastructure required to optimally understand, plan and respond to intensifying environmental health hazards in a changing climate. This analysis will inform the development of future national data infrastructure to enhance environmental health research and evidence-informed policy design and implementation in Australia.

Who Will Benefit

Through this project, the HEAL Research Network, the ARDC and the AIHW will have greater understanding of what data and infrastructure are needed for better environmental health research. The vision is for:

• Australian environmental and public health researchers to benefit from improved visibility of and access to health data for environmental health research studies
• Australian environmental and public health policymakers to better conduct environmental health data analyses and have access to improved decision support tools
• the Australian public to benefit from the discovery of environmental exposure-human health outcome relationships, improved understanding of disease risks and environmental disease modifiers, and predictive capability to guide policies and community behaviours in a changing climate.

The Partners

• Healthy Environments and Lives (HEAL) Research Network (lead; administered by the University of Canberra)
• ARDC
• Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW)

Target Outcomes

• Improved understanding of the health datasets and infrastructure needed to address key environmental health research scenarios
• Improved understanding of the optimal governance and access requirements, resolution, format, quality and linkage of environment and health data to enable analyses of environmental-public health policy priorities 
• Enhanced awareness of key infrastructure developments that would permit delivery of health and sociodemographic data at optimal spatial and temporal scales for robust environmental epidemiology and risk assessment
• Improved understanding of health data privacy risks and their mitigations for administrative data custodians and researchers 
• Improved trust and social licence for the use of administrative health data in environmental health studies