Equity and Hospitals: Do Usage and Treatment Costs Vary with Socioeconomic Status and Locality?

Equity of access and treatment are important goals of our health system. Reports on aggregate state expenditures mask potentially important underlying differences in the usage of and cost of services received, by those of varying socioeconomic status or region of residence. To shed light on these issues, this paper examines whether hospital usage and the average cost of hospital treatment per patient varies with socioeconomic status, Statistical Local Area and ARIA. We first apply a unique person based measure of socioeconomic status to avoid problems associated with geographically based measures. This is then imputed onto all in-patient separations from NSW hospitals, to assess the spatial distribution of usage and average cost of hospital treatment across the state.