Retrospective review of abdominal aortic aneurysm deaths in New Zealand: what proportion of deaths is potentially preventable by a screening programme in the contemporary setting?

Objectives: To describe the proportions of people dying from abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) who might have benefited from a formal screening programme for AAA.

Design: Retrospective cross-sectional review of deaths.

Setting And Study Populations: All AAA deaths registered in New Zealand from 2010 to 2014 in the absence of a national AAA screening programme.

Can administrative health utilisation data provide an accurate diabetes prevalence estimate for a geographical region?

Aim: To validate the New Zealand Ministry of Health (MoH) Virtual Diabetes Register (VDR) using longitudinal laboratory results and to develop an improved algorithm for estimating diabetes prevalence at a population level.

Methods: The assigned diabetes status of individuals based on the 2014 version of the MoH VDR is compared to the diabetes status based on the laboratory results stored in the Auckland regional laboratory result repository (TestSafe) using the New Zealand diabetes diagnostic criteria. The existing VDR algorithm is refined by reviewing the sensitivity and positive predictive value of the each of the VDR algorithm rules individually and as a combination.

Service planning implications of estimating Primary Health Organisation enrolment rate based on a Health Service Utilisation population rather than a Census-derived population.

Aim: Estimating Primary Health Organisation (PHO) enrolment rates with a census-derived estimated resident population denominator may provide misleading results because of numerator and denominator mismatch. This study uses the Health Service Utilisation (HSU) population denominator as an alternative.

Method: A HSU population was generated by record linkage of routinely collected datasets from the Ministry of Health via encrypted National Health Index (NHI).