The information presented in the Australian Cancer Atlas is current at the time of publication and will be updated when new data becomes available.
Each of the state and territory cancer registries assign Statistical Area level 2 (SA2) codes to each cancer diagnosis record based on the information they have about the patient’s usual residential address at diagnosis. While most of this process is now undertaken by geocoding, in which street address information is allocated a latitude and longitude co-ordinate and then mapped to SA2 boundaries, the actual process varies between the different cancer registries.
This process of allocating SA2 information to each record is not exact and relies on accurate address information being provided to the cancer registries. Challenges can include when a patient address is recorded as a post office box rather than a street address. Each registry has an ongoing process of checking and improving this process.
Information on the geographical location for data sourced from other sources such as hospitals, surveys, Medicare and screening registers was based on the available information provided by the data custodians, and sometimes required approximations such as when converting data between postcode and SA2.
