Letter to the editor

James Harrison, Jerry Moller, John Dolinis
1995 NSW Public Health Bulletin  
Suicide mortality in NSW: geographic variations 5 tewart et al raise issues of methodology, the significance of which extends well beyond the instance of suicide mortality. The recent emergence of an approach to managing public health in Australia (at both State and national levels) through defining, setting and monitoring quantitative targets carries implicit technical challenges, for which most public health practitioners are ill-prepared. A key challenge is to provide advice that enables
more » ... cymakers and other users of the information to make good comparisons of values of indicators, over time and between places. Frequently the indicators are derived from complete counts of deaths or hospital separations (and hence have no sampling error) and are expressed as population-based rates. The methods for analysing these data properly are not trivial and are not (in our experience) given much attention in the training that public health practitioners receive in epidemiology and biostatistics.
doi:10.1071/nb95029 fatcat:mifq6lgw75bsxlel2ld6g7vybe