Health funding – Australian Health Care Reform Alliance
“It is time for the Australian Health Care Agreements to go beyond hospital care,” Australian Health Care Reform Alliance (AHCRA) chair, Fiona Armstrong, says.
“The fragmentation and cost shifting that has plagued our system must be replaced with a funding process that allows for more effective integration of services and a focus on illness prevention, health promotion and primary health care,” she says.
The Alliance of more than 40 national key health care stakeholders met to develop recommendations for consideration by the Health Minister and the recently appointed National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (NHHRC). The focus was specifically on improving the Australian Health Care Agreements. Ms Armstrong said stakeholders had reached consensus on key steps to reform the funding agreement process.
This should be done in stages to include broadening the agreements beyond hospitals to include out-of-hospital services, improving accountability by focusing on health outcomes, developing indicators for measuring the contributions of things such as workforce, staffing, and skills mix, as well as cost benefit analyses of all health services at both provider and institutional level.
“Improving this funding mechanism is only a short term reform, however, and should be the Commission’s first step in the process of developing considered proposals for long term reform,” Ms Armstrong said. “In the long term it may be that this funding agreement might provide the framework for pooling of all Federal and state/territory health funding for the delivery of publicly funded health care. However, what must drive the reform proposal is the urgent need to restore equity and fairness to our health system.
“With the establishment of the reform commission, we have a unique opportunity to develop a truly sustainable health system to meet the future health care needs of the community. It is time for a health system designed around health needs; not one in which the services delivered are dictated by the funding system.”
