Tony Barnes

Cancer incidence and survival for Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory

Objective: To compare cancer incidence and survival for the Northern Territory (NT) Indigenous population with that of other Australians, and to assess NT Indigenous incidence time trends.

Improvements in Indigenous mortality in the Northern Territory over four decades.

Objective:To provide the first report of long‐term mortality trends over recent decades for an Indigenous Australian population. Very little information is available about improvements over time, or lack thereof, in the health status of Indigenous Australians.

Northern Territory Indigenous life expectancy improvements, 1967–2004

Objective: To assess the extent of changes in life expectancy at birth for the Indigenous population of the Northern Territory (NT) over the period 1967–2004, and to determine which age‐specific mortality rates were mostly responsible for such change.

Cancer diagnosis and treatment in the Northern Territory: assessing health service performance for indigenous Australians.

Background: Indigenous Australians with cancer are diagnosed with more advanced disease and have lower survival than other Australians.

The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

Little is formally known about the gambling practices, both regulated (e.g. poker machines) and unregulated (e.g. card games), of indigenous people in northern Australia, nor of the range of social consequences of these practices. To begin addressing this shortfall, a scoping study of indigenous gambling in the Northern Territory (NT) was conducted. This paper reports the key findings of this study and integrates them with information on indigenous gambling from the Northern Territory Prevalence Survey 2005 and from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey 2002. The emergent picture of indigenous gambling in the NT is one of widespread incorporation of gambling, both regulated and unregulated, into contemporary indigenous social practices with considerable negative consequence. However, the strength of this conclusion is tempered by the paucity of available data, by the limitations of existing gambling research methodologies and by the scoping purpose of the exercise.

Improving access to medicines among clients of remote area Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Services.

Despite unequivocally worse health, expenditure on Indigenous people through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) is considerably less than for other Australians. We report on the effectiveness of a program to supply PBS medicines to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Services (ATSIHSs) under section 100 (s.100) of the National Health Act 1953.

Do Indigenous Australians age prematurely? The implications of life expectancy and health conditions of older Indigenous people for health and aged care policy

OBJECTIVE To assess whether Indigenous Australians age prematurely compared with other Australians, as implied by Australian Government aged care policy, which uses age 50 years and over for population-based planning for Indigenous people compared with 70 years for non-indigenous people. METHODS Cross-sectional analysis of aged care assessment, hospital and health survey data comparing Indigenous and non-indigenous age-specific prevalence of health conditions. Analysis of life tables for Indigenous and non-indigenous populations comparing life expectancy at different ages. RESULTS At age 63 for women and age 65 for men, Indigenous people had the same life expectancy as non-indigenous people at age 70. There is no consistent pattern of a 20-year lead in age-specific prevalence of age-associated conditions for Indigenous compared with other Australians. There is high prevalence from middle-age onwards of some conditions, particularly diabetes (type unspecified), but there is little or no lead for others. CONCLUSION The idea that Indigenous people age prematurely is not well supported by this study of a series of discrete conditions. The current focus and type of services provided by the aged care sector may not be the best way to respond to the excessive burden of chronic disease and disability of middle-aged Indigenous people.

Indigenous aged care service use and need for assistance: how well is policy matching need?

Aim:  To investigate the effectiveness of the Australian Governments aged care planning framework for Indigenous Australians, particularly the use of a lower planning age of 50 years.

A new variant of dual-record population estimation with an application in remote indigenous communities

Dual-record system methods are commonly used as a basis for population estimation. A basic assumption is that the units sampled are drawn only from the population to be estimated. This assumption cannot be met for remote Indigenous communities in Australia. A new variant of dual-record population estimation is presented, which relies on the availability of specific additional information to relax the assumption of perfect frame specification. This variant is applied to two remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory of Australia, using locally available data sources. Further theoretical exploration of this method is presented along with possible applications in estimating area-enumerated populations and census coverage.

Progress in closing the gap in life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, 1967-2012

Objectives: To compare long term changes in mortality and life expectancy at birth (LE) of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and of the overall Australian population; to determine the contributions of changes in mortality in specific age groups to changes in LE for each population.