Health service location data is central to decisions about equitable access, service planning, and resilience across Australia’s cities and regions. AURIN is making Healthdirect Australia’s 2025 National Health Services Directory (NHSD) available through the AURIN Data Provider (ADP) so authenticated researchers can use it alongside AURIN’s broader collection of integrated, research-ready datasets.
The NHSD is a consolidated national directory of health services and related service providers across public and private sectors, designed to support both operational service delivery and evidence-based research and planning. For many use cases, it functions as a comprehensive list of services that helps reduce fragmentation in how health services are discovered, compared, and mapped.
What the NHSD dataset provides
The NHSD brings together structured information about health services, including geocoded locations and service attributes across a wide range of service types (including hospitals, general practice, and other community services). For researchers and decision-makers, this supports analysis that is difficult to do reliably when service listings are spread across multiple sources and formats.
In practical terms, the dataset supports consistent access to NHSD information and National Health Services Directory details (including service classification and location attributes), helping users move from service discovery to reproducible spatial analysis. This can include service categories relevant to aged care cancer pathways, community-based prevention, and targeted support programs (for example, childhood asthma management).
Typical questions this dataset can help answer include:
- Where are service gaps emerging as populations grow or shift?
- How does access change with transport networks, travel time assumptions, or local service capacity (including constraints in the primary care workforce)?
- Which communities may face compounded disadvantage when health access is considered alongside heat risk, housing stress, or demographic change?
Why this matters for urban and regional decision-making
AURIN’s role is to streamline access to hard-to-get data and provide the infrastructure and support that help researchers and policymakers focus on analysis rather than data acquisition and cleaning.
The NHSD aligns strongly with AURIN’s focus on decision-relevant evidence across interconnected urban systems, including:
- Climate change: mapping health service coverage against extreme heat exposure, bushfire risk, or flood impacts
- Demographic shifts: testing whether service distribution matches ageing patterns, migration, and growth corridors (including impacts on hours/care availability)
- Energy transition and infrastructure change: assessing how land use and infrastructure projects reshape access to essential services over time
When combined with AURIN’s health, transport, housing, land use, and demographic datasets, the NHSD becomes more than a directory. It becomes a practical input to spatial planning, evaluation, and targeted policy design: supporting analysis across primary care, community services, and acute care.
Built for consistent analysis, including clinical terminology
The 2025 NHSD release uses SNOMED CT terminology for service attributes. SNOMED CT is widely used internationally as a structured clinical terminology, supporting more consistent classification and interpretation across systems and studies.
For researchers, this improves the reliability of service grouping and comparison, especially when analysis spans jurisdictions, service types, and time periods. It also supports modern digital health workflows where consistent classification can reduce ambiguity across systems, including integration contexts involving My Health Record, Provider Connect Australia, Safescript Secure Settings, and other secure clinical data environments.
Example of research use, linking services to outcomes
Recent peer-reviewed work shows how AURIN-supported data sources can be combined to study spatial patterns in health outcomes.
In a PLOS One paper published February 20, 2026, researchers developed a machine learning-derived lung cancer vulnerability index for Queensland. The study extracted area-level variables from multiple collections, including NHSD data accessed via the AURIN Data Provider, alongside other health and socio-demographic datasets. The results demonstrate the value of being able to integrate health service location data with broader contextual indicators for spatial analysis—especially where prevention, screening, and treatment pathways intersect with workforce supply and service distribution.
How to access the 2025 NHSD via AURIN
Access pathways differ slightly by user type. The options below are designed to support self-service use where appropriate and governed access where needed. For teams looking to build automated pipelines, AURIN’s approach can also complement programmatic discovery patterns using NHSD APIs where applicable, alongside AURIN’s governance and access controls (including the NHSD process for authenticated use).
| User group | Access pathway | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| Academics (self-service) | Via the AURIN Data Provider dataset page | Use the dataset record to access and work with the data in the ADP |
| Government and not-for-profit users | Access via application | Submit the request form for assessment and provisioning |
Where this fits in AURIN’s broader data infrastructure
AURIN provides integrated access to thousands of datasets from sources such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, and local councils, plus specialist tools and support designed for applied research.
Adding the 2025 NHSD strengthens the platform’s ability to support:
- Health access and equity studies
- Place-based planning and evaluation
- Risk and resilience mapping
- Evidence for healthy and thriving communities
This also supports use cases tied to contemporary primary care reforms and operational planning, such as Medicare general practice catchment analysis, service discovery for primary health care needs, and planning for the evolving mix of clinicians (including nurses' new roles and broader leadership models). Where relevant, it can also be aligned with national infrastructure and standards, including the work of the Australian Digital Health Agency, telehealth provider Connect Australia initiatives, and identifiers frameworks such as Australia Healthcare Identifiers.
For researchers, planners, and policy teams, the goal is straightforward: make it faster and more reliable to move from question to evidence, using authoritative data that stands up to scrutiny; supported by consistent data tool practices, well-structured patient pathways (including patient discharge summaries considerations), and appropriate operational safeguards (including accreditation, emergency management planning, and voluntary collaboration across sectors).