The Committee recommends that the Minister for Health and Ageing explore ways that General Practitioners collate data on the height and weight of their patients, and the data be utilised to generate statistics on the level of obesity in Australia.
Agreed in part.
The Australian Government recognises the importance of health screening services offered by general practitioners, including monitoring of patients’ weight and their other lifestyle risk factors.
Some obesity statistics are available from the Bettering the Evaluation and Care of Health (BEACH) Program, a continuous collection of data on clinical activities in general practice managed by the University of Sydney and funded by industry and government partners including the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing and the Australian Government Department of Veterans’ Affairs. General practitioners participating in the BEACH Program record information about each clinical encounter within a given week, and include details about any screening or assessment undertaken such as the measurement of height and weight. Analysis of the BEACH data provides a useful insight into the relationship between patients’ risk factors for chronic disease and the health services they are accessing.
Although very useful for evaluating health care services, the Beach statistics provide incomplete estimates of the level of obesity in Australia, as the data excludes people who have not recently visited a general practitioner. Accurate statistics on population risk factors such as obesity are best collected through a survey of a randomly chosen sample of the population. The 2011-13 Australian Health Survey provides comprehensive data on the level of obesity in Australia. This includes objective measures of BMI and waist circumference available on children aged 2 years and over and adults as well as a range of related risk factor data.