Health policy is up for debate this week thanks to ABC TV’s Q and A program, featuring Federal Health Minister Tanya Plibersek and the Opposition’s health spokesman Peter Dutton. You can pose a question online and see some of the other questions that have already been lodged, including: Large corporate organisations have become major players in [...]
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HEALTH POLICY
If we weren’t so busy calling a horse race, how might we cover health in the run-up to the federal election?
It’s hard to turn a corner these days without running into someone who’s unhappy about mainstream media reporting of politics, and the lack of investigation and analysis of important policy matters. These are global concerns, however, as Professor Robert Picard, Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of [...]
READ MOREA mega-wrap of public health and policy reading from Croakey contributors
Croakey readers are welcome to sign up for (rather irregular) summaries of posts. If you’d like to join the mailing list, please send your email or leave it below. Here is the latest compilation, covering articles posted between 11 April and 3 September. As always, thanks are due to the many contributors who generously volunteer [...]
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To improve men’s mental health, focus on education, employment and providing services that men want to use
The foremost recommendation from a new report focused on mental health problems in young men is: “Efforts should be made by all sectors of the community to support the engagement of young men to achieve higher levels of education.” The second recommendation is: “Efforts should be made by all sectors of the community to support [...]
READ MORESome tips re digging for useful health policy information on the web
If you want to influence health policy, it helps to be abreast of the latest relevant evidence (in all its forms). But this can be difficult to achieve as so much of the evidence never sees the light of day through publication in journals or other public places (hence the Croakey Register of Unreleased Documents - [...]
READ MOREWhy Mary, Kylie and I may prefer to be known as Doctor….
As Croakey recalls (perhaps hazily), it was the former Federal Health Minister Dr Neal Blewett who started a debate some years ago about who are the real doctors in health. His suggestion, as I remember, was that “real doctors” have doctorates. More recently, The Power Index (a sister publication of Crikey) ran an article querying [...]
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New international project to support evidence in practice and policy
DECIDE is a new international collaborative research project for developing and evaluating strategies for communicating evidence-based recommendations and policy briefs. In the article below, one of the researchers involved in the project, Andy Oxman from the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, provides an overview of DECIDE. *** Helping inform patients, clinicians and policymakers [...]
READ MORETackling the health issues left in the “too hard” basket: what can we learn from the US?
Public health policy consultant Margo Saunders has taken a look at some recent reports from the US Institute of Medicine, and considers some possible lessons for Australia. Margo Saunders writes: While progress on so many health issues in Australia seems to be frustratingly slow, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) is charging head with a [...]
READ MOREEvidence into policy: what works?
In Sydney tomorrow, Gary Banks, chairman of the Productivity Commission, is due to officially launch the Centre for Informing Policy in Health with Evidence from Research. Professor Sally Redman, the chief investigator of the Centre, explains below what it aims to do. *** Building an evidence base for informed health policy Professor Sally Redman writes: [...]
READ MOREBeyond the private heath insurance industry spin
The private health insurance lobby received pretty much the sort of headlines (see here and here) it must have been seeking when it released research sounding the alarm about the impact of means testing of the private health insurance rebate – with the notable exception of Sue Dunlevy’s story in The Australian. Health policy analyst [...]
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