Synopsis: Understanding health trajectories over time is important to informing prevention, service provision, and policies that impact the health of populations. Adolescents who have contact with the youth justice system often have complex health and psychosocial needs, but their health trajectories are poorly understood. Justice-involved adolescents are challenging to recruit for survey-based research and are notoriously difficult to follow over time. Cross-sectoral data linkage – that is, combining multiple sources of health and ‘non-health’ administrative data for the same individual – provides unique opportunities to understand and thereby improve the health of these socially excluded young people.

This presentation briefly explained what cross-sectoral data linkage is, considered its advantages and disadvantages, and briefly described two cross-sectoral data linkage studies of justice-involved adolescents in Australia. The presentation ended with some brief reflections on the potential to implement these methods in other countries and settings.

Questions this event will addressed:

• What is ‘cross-sectoral data linkage’?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of cross-sectoral data linkage as a research method?
• How can cross-sectoral data linkage be used to study the health trajectories of socially excluded adolescents?

Speakers: Professor Stuart Kinner & Lindsay Pearce

Professor Stuart Kinner is Head of the Justice Health Group spanning Curtin University and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. He has produced >300 publications and attracted >$30 million in research funding. Stuart Chairs Australia’s National Youth Justice Health Advisory Group, and serves on the WHO Health in Prisons Programme Steering Group.

Lindsay Pearce is a Research Fellow in the Justice Health Group. Her research has focused on the health and health care experiences of vulnerable populations including people who use drugs, people living with HIV and Hepatitis C, and people in contact with the criminal justice system. Lindsay manages several data linkage studies for the Justice Health Group, including an unprecedented linkage of national youth justice and health data, and has a keen interest in bridging data linkage research with qualitative and lived experience expertise.

Date: Thursday 3 October 2024

Time: 1:00pm to 2:00pm AEST

Format: Online

Event Recording

Advancing Adolescent Health in the Asia Pacific: A virtual community to share knowledge and support collaboration

Despite one in two of the world’s adolescents living in the Asia-Pacific region, adolescent health is a relatively new field of endeavour in Australia as well as the region. It is a field that spans policy makers from multiple sectors, researchers from different disciplines, and practitioners working in health services, schools and communities and encompasses a multitude of health topics and concerns. Despite this, there are few opportunities to come together to share, showcase and build capacity to improve adolescent health and wellbeing in the region.

This seminar series aims to provide opportunities for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, implementers, young advocates – indeed, anyone interested in the health and wellbeing of adolescents – to enhance their understanding of adolescent health and wellbeing, with a focus on research.

This series is supported by the Centre of Research Excellence for Driving Global Investment in Adolescent Health. Led by a team at the Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, it brings together leading Australian research groups including the University of Melbourne, Burnet Institute, University of New South Wales, University of Queensland, University of South Australia, and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute.

Read more about the series here