But we need to plough more money into public dental health, or more generous health insurance, so that dentists in public clinics can match the high incomes they can earn working privately.
Some dentists I know are already helping towards a solution here. They work one day per week pro bono. Perhaps more could follow this example.
Posted by analyst, Monday, 8 October 2007 10:38:23 AM

Interesting issue dental health, considering that there is a correlation between poor dental health and heart disease.

There also a correlation between dental health and miscarriage.

The plain fact is that poor dental health leads to adverse health outcomes, and considering around 67% of the Australian population earns less than the average wage it is not difficult to understand.

Improving the dental health of Australians is a cost saving measure, simply because it will decrease the numbers of patients requiring cardio-thoracic surgery for heart disease caused by poor dental health.

Ninja

Paying health professionals when their patients are well is an interesting concept and one that offers lots of potential for improving the health of our community. It was canvassed by teh House of Representatives Inquiry in to Health Funding.

The two big drawbacks are that practitioners try desperately not to attract ill patients who are in most immediate need of care (cherry picking), and it "encourages" doctors to under-service their patients. Getting GPs to buy their patients' pharmaceuticals reduces pharmaceutical bills by 10-20%. These could be overcome by the HIC using similar measures to prevent underservicing as they currently monitor overservicing.

There are considerable vested interests keen to maintain the status quo and no real demonstration of the political will to tackle the big issues.

The unfortunate message our politicians get from this is that not only should hospitals be paid for out of current funding but a range of new preventative programmes should also be paid for from the same pool.

I don't disagree with the policy objective but it does need extra money and better co-ordination between the various layers of Government. Maybe the preventative stuff could be moved into or aligned with the divisions of general practice rather than having 3 levels of agencies competing to see who can make us eat less and exercise more ?

I would think over stuffed EDs and over long elective surgery lists are the real political problems, and that one appears to feed the other.

I wonder if the daily drama of the bulging EDs could be solved by running hospitals with enough spare bed capacity to meet anticipated demand ? Would this then shift the problem to the elective surgery lists ? I ask because there seem to be some knowledgable contributors who may be able to answer.

A well argued rational proposal as opposed to the ideologically driven Jeremy Sammut article.

I ask because there seem to be some knowledgable contributors who may be able to answer.
Posted by westernred, Tuesday, 9 October 2007 1:31:13 PM

You are correct in assuming we need more hospital beds and the problem with bulging emergency departments is the lack of available public hospital beds, so while patients wait in emergency departments for a hospital bed this creates what is commonly known as access block.

Lets take an example of a hospital I know about. 60-70% of hospital admission come through the emergency department. This then has a flow on effect in that elective surgery is cancel because of 2 factors, lack of hospital beds and a lack of theatre time. (If a hospital is over budget, elective surgery is postponed).

The above factors are a direct result of budget reductions to public hospitals over the last decade or so.

If one looks at a time series of available public hospital beds from around the 1970's to now, it is easy to see that there has been more than a 50% reduction in available public hospital beds.

Australia's population has grown so apart from existing hospitals reducing their bed numbers, there has been a failure in investing in new infrastructure. Both State and Federal governments have tried various models with the private sector. By and large these models have been expensive dismal failures.

Around the time Paul Keating became Prime Minister, it became fashionable for 'cost effectiveness' 'improved efficiencies' so all the micro economics of the Keating government has led us to this point.

Hello John W and James H,

John, I was unaware that what I wrote about regarding the system of ‘wellness’ which operated in rural China had been discussed here in Oz. So thank you for that piece of info.

I was not proposing that we should adopt a similar system – it would be unworkable given the prevailing social environment. I was merely trying to substantiate Albert E’s assertion that we need to look at a problem from a completely new perspective. Perhaps this is where the problem for many of Australia’s woes lays – the lack of creative thinking by our leaders both political and otherwise. Personally, I doubt either of the major parties can claim to have the ‘common good’ as the prime objective underpinning their particular ideology.

James H, let us for arguments’ sake accept that Keating’s micro economic management model which he favoured and promoted, has got Australia to where it is in the area of Health care. My qn then is - what has Howard and Costello done over the past 8 – 10 years to reverse the situation?

The ‘Adam Smith’ model which I believe the Liberal Party favours and influences its policy platform, whilst full of promise in theory is impractical and morally bankrupt because it fails to consider or factor in that fundamental human failing ‘greed’. One example to illustrate my contention is the galloping gap between the rich and the poor evidenced in Australia since the Libs gained office in the 90s.

The ‘blame’ game which governments of all political persuasions and their advocates seem to indulge in will not help to resolve difficult problems - only maturity, partisanship, dialog and a genuine desire to serve the whole community will.