Statistical Services Branch PHA minimum requirements

When submitting a PHA to the Statistical Services Branch for review, please consider the following:

Communicate project aims and associated requirements

  • The application should provide a coherent, logical description of your project.
  • The content of the application should clearly explain your requirements.

Request relevant data

  • All data items requested should be relevant to your study and justified by the study's aims and methodology. Only data items necessary for the study should be requested.
  • Consider the needs of your project and ensure that the requested data items meet your requirements. Amendments to request overlooked data items are not given priority and may significantly delay your project.
  • Be specific. Requests to receive 'all demographic' information are not actionable. You must specify individual data items. Requests to receive all variables from a database (e.g. QHAPDC or Perinatal) will not be approved.

Completeness

  • All sections of the PHA must be completed.
  • Consider the format of the data items requested (if a date is requested, what format do you require - year or month-year?).
  • The content of the PHA should align with the content of your ethics approval.

Please note that a new PHA proforma was introduced in March 2021.  All new PHA applications need to use the new proforma.

SSB PHA Companion Document

The PHA companion document has been created to assist researchers when completing their Public Health Act (PHA) application involving SSB data and/or SSB data linkage services.

Last updated: 1 March 2016