SUMMARY
The CDE Indigenous Mortality Quality Study involved the linkage of registered deaths to Census records, for the 11 month period following the Census. Nationally, 98,898 registered death records were linked to Census records with a linkage rate of 92% achieved. However a much lower linkage rate was achieved for Indigenous registered death records, with more than one quarter (26%) of all Indigenous deaths not linked. Of the 1,800 Indigenous death registrations available in the study, there were 1,323 records that were able to be linked to a Census record.
For the purpose of this study, the linked record was assumed to be an Indigenous record if a positive response was recorded against the Indigenous status question on either the death registration or the corresponding Census record. This resulted in an increase in the total number of death records identified as Indigenous (from either the death registration or from a corresponding Census record) from 1,800 to 2,123 records, or from 1.7% to 2.0% of all registered deaths.
While 323 additional death records were able to be identified as Indigenous from Census records, more may have been expected if all death records had been linked. A key reason records could not be linked appears to be Census undercount, with a corresponding Census record not existing to link to for many Indigenous death records. Caution should be used when interpreting the results from this study given the number of records in the unlinked file.
Recommendations
The study has provided a range of information that can guide the development of both future linkage studies and strategies to improve Indigenous identification in mortality data. It is recommended that:
- Further work be undertaken to better understand the propensity for people to identify as Indigenous and under what circumstances this changes. Information is needed both from the perspective of individuals and from the perspective of service providers (i.e. the propensity of service providers to identify their clients as Indigenous) to both understand, and then correctly apply results from linkage studies where there are differences in reporting of Indigenous status by data source.
- Best practice guidelines be developed to support national consistency in approaches for studies involving linkage of Indigenous records.
- The study be repeated following the 2011 Census of Population and Housing and opportunities investigated for incorporating other datasets, to evaluate whether these could be used to supplement information on Indigenous status from death registrations and improve the quality of Indigenous mortality data.
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