Overall health

Health Domain

Overall health

Self-assessed health status is a commonly used measure of overall health. It reflects a person's perception of their own health at a given point in time, providing a broad picture of health outcomes across the general population.

Health Status

This measure shows the proportion of adult Canberrans who rate their overall health as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. This is important because good health is fundamental to our wellbeing and quality of life.

In 2022, around half of the people surveyed considered their overall health to be very good or excellent. In 2022, there was no difference between men and women or across age groups.

Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of Canberrans whose self-rated health was ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’ remained stable.

ACT General Health Survey.

Line graph of percentage of Canberrans reporting very good or excellent health, by year from 2018 to 2022. In 2022, 46.8% reported very good or excellent health compared to 52.8% in 2021.

Self-rated health status is a common measure of overall health, which reflects a person's perception of their own health. It also provides a broad picture of a population's overall health.

Respondents were asked to rate their personal health during the past 4 weeks as ‘excellent’, ‘very good’, ‘good’, ‘fair’ or ‘poor’.

The measure shows self-reported data collected through computer-assisted telephone interviewing. Estimates were weighted to adjust for differences in the probability of selection among respondents and were benchmarked to the estimated residential population using the latest available Australian Bureau of Statistics population estimates.

Persons include respondents who identified as male, female, other and those who refused to answer.

Statistically significant differences are difficult to detect for smaller jurisdictions such as the Australian Capital Territory. Sometimes, even large apparent differences may not be statistically significant. This is particularly the case in breakdowns of small populations because the small sample size means that there is not enough power to identify even large differences as statistically significant.