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This article is the second in a two-part review of law's possible role in a regulatory approach to healthier nutrition and obesity prevention in Australia. As discussed in Part 1, law can intervene in support ...
Governments are increasingly introducing performance management systems to improve the quality and outcomes of health care. Two types of approaches have been described: assurance systems that use summative inf...
Medical migration sees the providers of medical services (in particular medical practitioners) moving from one region or country to another. This creates problems for the provision of public health and medical...
Based upon a review of articles published in Australia's major newspapers over the period January 2001 to December 2005, a case study approach has been used to investigate why, when compared with other small b...
There are several innovative service delivery models in the United States (US) relevant to long-term care policy development and implementation in New Zealand. An especially fruitful source of innovation has b...
Access to "high cost medicines" through Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) is tightly regulated. It is inherently difficult to apply any criteria-based system of control in a way that provides a ...
Indigenous Australians have significantly poorer status on a large range of health, educational and socioeconomic measures and successive Australian governments at state and federal level have committed to red...
Abortion policy is still contentious in many parts of the world, and periodically it emerges to dominate health policy debates. This paper examines one such debate in Australia centering on research findings b...
If the outcomes of the recent COAG meeting are implemented, Australia will have a new set of benchmarks for its health system within a few months. This is a non-trivial task. Choice of benchmarks will, explici...
In Australia, government-subsidised access to high-cost medicines is "targeted" to particular sub-sets of patients under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to achieve cost-effective use. In order to determine ...
The addition of the chemical fluorine to the water supply, called water fluoridation, reduces dental caries by making teeth more resistant to demineralisation and more likely to remineralise when initially dec...
We investigated the ways in which research evidence about the health effects from secondhand smoke (SHS) and smokefree policies was publicly used or regarded by New Zealand parliamentary politicians, during ef...
Internationally, many health care interventions were diffused prior to the standard use of assessments of safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Disinvestment from ineffective or inappropriately applied...
There is increasing worldwide recognition of the need for government policies to address the recent increases in the incidence and prevalence of childhood obesity. The complexity and inter-relatedness of the d...
The Australian government sponsored trials aimed at addressing problems in after hours primary medical care service use in five different parts of the country with different after hours care problems. The stud...
There is a lack of consensus about what men's health constitutes in Australia. The absence of a widely accepted definition has been problematic for establishing state and national men's health policies. I conside...
There are currently limited pathways into a career in health policy research in Australia, due in part to a serious absence of health policy research capability in Australian universities.
For nearly two decades calls have been made to expand the role of midwives within maternity services in Australia. Although some progress has been made, it has been slow and, at system-wide level, limited. The...
The actions of policymakers are critical to advancing tobacco control. To evaluate the feasibility of using anonymous in-depth interviews to ascertain policymakers' knowledge about, and attitudes to, the tobac...
Depression is one of the leading causes of disability in Australia. The cultural and linguistic diversity of the Australian population poses a significant challenge to health policy development, service provis...
Since the late 1980s, there has been evidence of an international trend towards more organised primary care. This has taken a number of forms including the emergence of primary care organisations. Underpinning...
Governments world wide are increasingly demanding outcome measures to evaluate research investment. Health and medical research outputs can be considered as gains in knowledge, wealth and health. Measurement o...
The Consumers' Health Forum of Australia and the National Health and Medical Research Council has recently developed a Model Framework for Consumer and Community Participation in Health and Medical Research in or...
Many jurisdictions have used public funding of health care to reduce or remove price at the point of delivery of services. Whilst this reduces an important barrier to accessing care, it does nothing to discrim...
This article provides a synopsis of the new dynamics of the global biopharma industry. The emergence of global generics companies with capabilities approximating those of 'big pharma' has accelerated the blurr...
Industrial renewal in the bio/nanopharma sector is important for the long term strength of the Australian economy and for the health of its citizens. A variety of factors, however, may have caused inadequate a...
'Evergreening' is not a formal concept of patent law. It is best understood as a social idea used to refer to the myriad ways in which pharmaceutical patent owners utilise the law and related regulatory proces...
This article provides a commentary, from a community pharmacy perspective, on the policy environment for the pharmacy sector in Australia, with a particular focus on present challenges arising from proposals t...
There has been a growing interest over recent years, both within Australia and overseas, in enhancing the translation of research into policy and practice. As one mechanism to improve the dissemination and upt...
A group of consumers of private hospital services and their carers collaborated with staff of a Melbourne private hospital and with industry representatives to develop a consumer-driven performance report on c...
Systems for planning are a critical component of the infrastructure for public health. Both in Australia and internationally there is growing interest in how planning processes might best be strengthened to im...
Rehabilitation and other forms of subacute care play an important role in the Australian health care system, yet there is ambiguity around clinical definitions of subacute care, how it differs from acute care,...
Subsidised access to high-cost medicines in Australia is restricted under national programs (the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, PBS, and the Repatriation Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, RPBS) with a view to a...
This paper reviews methods that can be used to assess the impact of medicine use on population health outcomes. In the absence of a gold standard, we argue that a convergence of evidence from different types o...
Since the 1960s newborn screening (NBS) for several rare and serious disorders has been in place across Australia. Testing of a simple blood spot now enables the early detection of over 30 conditions. Policies...
This paper provides an overview of the regulation of quality assurance for genetic testing in Australia and New Zealand and outlines the steps currently being taken to critically appraise and improve the regul...
Australia has an evolving national cancer control agenda. In this paper, we review the history and development of cancer control policies in Australia up to the end of 2005, and discuss the principal publicati...
For the last 20 years injury prevention policy in Australia has been hampered by poor consultation practices, limited stakeholder involvement, inadequate allocation of resources, poor implementation, and an ab...
Since 2004 the Howard Coalition government has implemented a new policy framework and administrative arrangements as part of its program of reform in Indigenous affairs. In this paper I will describe both the ...
This paper describes the outcomes of episodes of care for adults in public sector mental health services across Australia, with a view to informing the debate on service quality. Health of the Nation Outcome S...
Recent attention has focused on access of communities to pharmacy services in rural areas. To increase access to pharmacy services in rural Western Australia some doctors have been granted a licence to dispens...
On 22 June 2005 the Senate of the Commonwealth of Australia voted to establish an inquiry into workplace harm related to toxic dust and emerging technologies (including nanoparticles). The inquiry became known...
It is accepted knowledge that social and economic conditions – like education and income – affect population health. What remains uncertain is whether the degree of inequality in these conditions influences popul...
World-wide concern about increasing antibiotic resistance has focused attention on strategies to improve antibiotic use. This research adapted Australian best-practice guidelines on the prophylactic use of ant...
This paper aims to describe the influence of general practice based research on the development of two specific policy initiatives, namely the Heartwatch Programme in Ireland and the Better Outcomes in Mental ...
In 1998 a formal process using the criteria of safety, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness (evidence based medicine) on the introduction and use of new medical procedures was implemented in Australia. As part...
To assess the social capital profile of a known disadvantaged area a large cross-sectional survey was undertaken. The social capital profile of this area was compared to data from the whole of the state. The o...
In recent years, national and state/territory governments have undertaken an increasing number of initiatives to strengthen general practice and improve its links with the rest of the primary health care secto...
On 1 November 2000, a series of new item numbers was added to the Medicare Benefits Schedule, which allowed for case conferences between physicians (including psychiatrists) and other multidisciplinary provide...