Under the Public Health Act 2010, laboratories, hospitals, medical practitioners, schools, and child care centres must notify NSW Health or their local public health unit of diagnoses of certain infectious diseases and adverse events following immunisation. These notifications are compiled into the Notifiable Conditions Information Management System (NCIMS), which is managed by Health Protection NSW.

Data from NCIMS is accessible in the form of the NCRES (Notifiable Conditions Records for Epidemiology and Surveillance) data asset which is constructed to support epidemiology and biostatistics analysis and data linkage.

NSW wide. All notifiable conditions reported to NSW Health. For a condition to be notified, a patient must seek medical help, be diagnosed with the condition, have the appropriate laboratory tests, and then the diagnosis must be reported to the local public health unit or the Ministry of Health.

For most diseases, the notification data represent only a proportion of the total cases occurring in the community, that is, only those cases for which health care was sought, a test conducted and a diagnosis made, followed by a notification to health authorities. The degree of under-representation of all cases is unknown and may vary by disease and geographic location. In interpreting these data it is important to note that changes in notifications over time may not solely reflect changes in disease prevalence or incidence. Changes in testing policies; screening programs, including the preferential testing of high risk populations; the use of less invasive and more sensitive diagnostic tests; and periodic awareness campaigns may influence the number of notifications that occur over time.

Information used to inform public health by alerting authorities to individual cases that need to be managed, detect clusters of cases that may identify public health risk, population health data which provides information on patterns of disease.

NSW state data

Public Health Act 2010