Week 5: Health Services Flashcards
What are the major determinants of health that lie outside of Health System Control?
1) Socioeconomic status - and all the associated factors resulting from low socioeconomic status
2) The gap between high and low income earners
3) Genetics
4) Culture
5) Factors that affect the ability to access:
Transport, service availability, Public transport, Easy of access, City planning, Licensing Hours, Education, Employment
6) Factors that affect the need to access:
Education, Environment, Workplace Safety, Employment, Firearm Access
How do we measure a Health System’s performance?
When a health system is developed, we must also be able to evaluate it, via assessing:
1) Health Outcomes
Did the system make a difference? If so, where?
2) Cost Effectiveness and Cost
Is the health system itself cost-effective? Is accessing the services affordable?
3) Access
Are the services accessible to consumers?
Are the services equally accessible?
4) Quality of Health Care
Does the system provide good quality health care, or are there shortcomings which inhibit the provision of good health care?
Health Outcomes vs Expenditure
In a good Health System, the expenditure should match the health outcomes. Because, according to the ideal, the health system is he thing causing the good health outcomes…
This is not necessarily the case. For example, Americans spend relatively more on health care than Japanese do, and Japanese have much higher outcomes (not proportional to their expendature), and Americans have relatively poorer oucomes (not necessarily relative to their expendature).
I think that, in a good health care system, Health care outcomes should by far exceed health care costs, because a good health care system will involve an emphasis on prevention, especially through primary health channels (which are, generally, speaking, cheaper for consumers) which will reduce the expendature associated with more chronic or serious conditions.
What is a current proposal for improving health care?
With advances in medicine and treatments, we now have a situation where an increasingly large proportion of health services are delivered through primary care facilities such as GP clinics.
There are now many treatments that can be done locally (either in patient’s home, or in primary health clinics) that had previously only been done in hospital settings.
This shift has made it easier for consumers to access care, but it has also placed a massive burden upon primary health care. This burden, in turn, has also created access issues for consumers.
Current Ideas about how to improve Health Care in Australia include:
1) Increasing the number Primary Health care facilities. This includes more emphasis on preventative care which has the potential to massively reduce Health Care spendeture through reducing incidence of preventable diseases.
2) Fewer specialists
3) Universal access
4) Integration of care
i. e. developing the multidisciplinary framework
5) Improved Quality of Care
6) Better Information
Informing the public to increase health outcomes
About services, about health, about prevention, about options
What is the role of research in improving health care?
Modern health care prides itself on being ‘evidence-based medicine’. This implies that the treatments used, the information we have about disease and prevention, all comes from detailed epidemiological studies and reports.
However, it seems that Australia’s Health Care System has moved away from this model of late and that, while these kinds of researches are influencing care at the paienet-doctor level, RESEARCH IS NOT INFORMING POLICY DECISION THE WAY THAT IT SHOULD.
This leads to frightfully uninformed, and practically erratic policy decisions, that ultimately result in the spendature of more Australian Health dollar.
The problem is that we need to invest money to make future savings. There is much economical evidence to suggest that investing money into research will better inform policy decisions and thus aid not only the provision of quality care, but reduce health dollar expendature because the result is a more exact and accurate frame within which to operate.
