A healthier system for all

Gaps in the Australian healthcare system could be highlighted and tackled using research from The Australian National University. Francesco Paolucci, Fellow at the Australian Centre for Economic Research, studied how policymakers arrive at decisions on key health policy issues, with a view to identifying gaps. "Healthcare policy is often done in an ad hoc manner. It is also often not clear what the goals of policy are, and sometimes programs or services that are being set up by policymakers with 'good' intentions have unexpected or undesired results on equity and efficiency," he said. "We wanted to find out what policymakers' preferences were for equity and efficiency - what criteria they used to determine whether or not a service should be reimbursed or subsidised, and whether healthcare access should be prioritised according to patients' age, income or other health status characteristics. "To address these issues, we developed a questionnaire to find out what policymakers think needs to happen in their healthcare system. In this paper we measured policymakers, but it could easily be used for society as a whole.