The Australian Health Reform Agreement has provided the basis for major change in the delivery of health care services. While the components of reform have undergone extensivenegotiation between Commonwealth and State governments, and have been subject to academic and other commentary, little is...

This brief methods paper explains how to use the NSW Government Health Costs of Care Standards to estimate the cost of presentations to emergency departments (ED) in NSW. We begin with a discussion of the allocation of presentations according to visit type, triage category and mode of separation...

An Early Discharge Program (EDP) for medically uncomplicated obstetrics patients operates from three hospitals in Sydney's western suburbs, Westmead Hospital, a large teaching hospital, and Auburn and Blacktown, which are smaller district hospitals. The patients are discharged home between 6 and...

A cost effectiveness analysis of differing school based TB infection screening regimes was conducted for 1996 populations of Year 1 and Year 8 students who attended schools in the areas of Central Sydney Area Health Service and South Western Sydney Area Health Service. The costs of screening...

In June 1990 the Australian Health Ministers endorsed a policy, known as the Nationally Funded Centres (NFC) programme, aimed at providing new and developing technologies in a coordinated and planned way on a national basis. The principal objective was to ensure that such technologies were...

This analysis compared the costs and benefits of tamoxifen for women with early breast cancer. The main question addressed was: what are the costs and benefits of the use of tamoxifen as an adjuvant treatment in terms of survival and disease free survival for women? Survival and disease free...

A study of client satisfaction with postnatal care was conducted to ascertain the extent to which a program for the early discharge of obstetric patients meets its clients' needs. Women who were eligible for early discharge were surveyed at the end of their period of postnatal care. Satisfaction...

Both adverse selection and moral hazard models predict a positive relationship between risk and insurance; yet the most common finding in empirical studies of insurance is that of a negative correlation. In this paper we investigate the relationship between ex ante risk and private health...

In the Australian public health system, access to elective surgery is rationed through provision of health care services, it is generally assumed that a patient?s waiting time and locations. In this paper we undertake Oaxaca-Blinder and DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux decompostition analyses to attribute...