Australians are paying too much for prescription drugs. The cost of this overpayment is at least $1.3 billion a year, or $3.5 million a day. This equates to 14 per cent of the entire Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) budget. In a time of escalating health costs and other strains on the Commonwealth Budget, spending on...

Healthy for Life (HfL) Program was established with a set of key objectives to improve the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It focuses on mothers, babies and children; early detection and management of chronic disease; and long-term health outcomes. About 100 primary health-care sites across Australia were funded by the Australian Government...

This report presents 2012 data for performance indicators in the National Partnership Agreement on Improving Public Hospital Services. It includes measures of the extent to which states and territories met targets for emergency department lengths of stay of four hours or less, and for lengths of time spent waiting for elective surgery. It is being...

This report presents a brief history of the development of the Mental Health Intervention Classification (MHIC) that has been designed for use in Australian health-care settings, and details the most recent iteration of the classification scheme. The rationale for developing a MHIC is to allow collection of mental health intervention information using a standard classification...

This paper looks at how Australian governments have responded to anti-microbial resistance (AMR) since the problem became evident in the 1980s. Of particular importance in Australia’s response was the 1999 establishment of the Joint Expert Technical Advisory Committee on Antibiotic Resistance (JETACAR), which was set up to provide independent expert scientific advice on the threat...