A Healthier Future for all Australians - Final Report June 2009
Chapter 4. Redesigning our health system to respond to emerging challenges
A long term health reform plan requires us to move beyond the issues of ‘here and now’ and the current configuration of our health system. It is all too easy to prescribe ‘bandaid’ solutions that involve patching or ‘fixing’ existing issues such as lack of access to, or poor quality of, some health services. Many such bandaid solutions also involve making changes in one part of the health system, without recognising that the various elements of the health system are interdependent. It is vital, for example, that proposals for improving access to hospitals build upon recommendations to improve primary health care, and vice versa.
In this chapter, we put forward our recommendations for more fundamental redesign of our health system that will allow us to better respond to emerging challenges. We want to show how these recommendations must permeate our entire approach to how we organise and fund health services in the future.
Taken as a package, our reforms are about transformational change. Our vision of a reformed health system includes:
- Embedding prevention and early intervention into every aspect of our health system and our lives;
- Connecting and integrating health and aged care services for people over their lives; and
- Evolving Medicare – moving beyond the Medicare Benefits Schedule to building the ‘next generation’ of Medicare.
We will describe each of these major reform elements in this chapter.
