Background: Understanding inequity is necessary for addressing disparities in health outcomes in many populations. This presentation summarises three recent studies of the association between Indigenous health outcomes and socioeconomic status (SES) in the Northern Territory.^1,2,3   

Methods: The studies utilised a variety of datasets and sources. The first study combined NT public hospital admissions data with socioeconomic indexes for areas (SEIFA) in a multilevel logistic regression model to assess the distribution of total and potentially avoidable hospitalisations. In the second study hospital admissions and deaths data were distributed across five categories of SES to assess health disparities. In the third study, a decomposition method was used to assess the relative contribution of six modifiable risk factors to the Indigenous life expectancy gap.

Results/Discussions: Poverty was the common driver of outcomes in all three studies. Lifting SEIFA scores for family income and education/occupation by two quintiles was sufficient to overcome the Indigenous /non-Indigenous disparities for hospital admissions rates. Similarly the second study demonstrated a strong inverse relationship between SES group and both deaths and hospital admissions. The third study highlighted that poverty is the leading modifiable risks and was responsible for more than a third of the life expectancy gap.

Conclusions/implications: The results support reframing the Indigenous health gap as being a consequence of poverty and not simplistically of ethnicity. Efforts to improve Indigenous health outcomes should recognise poverty as the prominent underlying determinant. Reducing poverty should be placed squarely at the centre of efforts to improve Indigenous health outcomes, including strategies to close the life expectancy gap.