Reducing Healthcare Costs in Australia: Strategies and Impacts

This presentation discusses the causes of rising healthcare costs in Australia and strategies to reduce them. It also highlights the impacts of healthcare costs on Australian citizens. The key words used are healthcare, cost, reduction, and Australia. The presentation includes a search strategy, criteria for considering studies, and a critical review of evidence. The articles used in the presentation are from peer-reviewed journals and are not more than 10 years old. The presentation is relevant to healthcare and economics courses in Australian universities.

healthcare cost in Australia
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 Date:
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Introduction
 The topic of discussion is how to reduce the healthcare costs in Australia. This
topic is significant in the following ways;
First, since this is an issue that is in the heart of many Australians in which
cash strapped Australian families would like to know how health care costs
can be reduced (Lehnert, Heider, Leicht, Heinrich, Corrieri, Luppa, M.,
Riedel-Heller and König, 2011).
There has been an increase in healthcare cost in the last few years. Greg Hunt,
who is the minister in charge of Health announced that private health
insurance premiums will rise by an average of 3.9% from the second quarter of
the year(Oldridge,2008).

Cont..
The average Australian citizen can agree that there has been
consistent rise in healthcare costs over the last 15 years.
Australian families are burdened by amongst other things the
rise of cost in education, healthcare and a slow wage growth.
 This paper seeks to look into the causes of the rise in prices
of healthcare and how this hikes affects the Australian citizen.

Formulated Question
How can healthcare costs be reduced in Australia.

Search strategy
 First, we will formulate keywords and use them in our search
for resources. The following are some of the ways that we
can utilize to combine our search terms(Oldridge,2008).
After formulating the key words, we shall then use the key
words to narrow our search for easy results.

Key words
For this research the key words are;
1. Healthcare
2. Cost
3. Reduction
4. Australia

Boolean Operator (And)(Or)
This strategy uses the key terms to narrow our search.
For example, we will use terms such as healthcare cost and
reduction in Australia.
This strategy will be important because it brings few results that
point us to the relevant information needed to answer this question.
 we shall use this strategy to include multiple unique concepts.
When using Or on the Boolean operator as a strategy , either term
may appear and it broadens your terms to bring about more results
on the topic and also brings more related concepts.
This strategies will make our research more effective and efficient.
It is also time saving.

Criteria for considering studies
This criteria is used to narrow our result to a more
manageable amount of information.
Some of the criteria in use will be that all the article will not
be more than 10 years old.
They will all be related to healthcare in Australia (Gunter and Terry,
2005).

Limitations
Our research will have the following limits.
Date: Articles and all information will not be older than 10
years.
Peer reviewed article (Coory, 2004).
Publication type: research articles, evidence based practice.

Articles
1. https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/180_11_070604/coo10869_fm
.pdf
 This article sheds some light on ageing and health care costs in Australia.
The article specifically analyses how the Australian Aging population
affects the costs of health care .
It also provides a comparison with other countries of similar stature.
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1550638/
This article provides some information on how the cost of health care can
be affected by amongst other factors including the model of the healthcare
system
3. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077558711399580
This article provides information on the effects of an aging population to the
healthcare costs.

Critical review of evidence
According to these articles, older people use more healthcare
compared to younger people. As the number of elderly
people continue to grow, the amount of money or funding
required also increases.
In countries belonging to the OECD, one of the articles shows
that in countries where majority of the population is over 65
years, the amount of money used in healthcare as a
proportion of the GDP is higher.

Continuation..
 One of the articles investigated the relationship between
multiple chronic conditions and the healthcare cost (Graves
and Zheng, 2014).
An aging population is mostly is associated with MCCs
multiple chronic conditions which gives rise to certain
healthcare cost outcomes such as increased medication costs,
out of pockets costa and general total health care costs.

Cont..
https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/180_11_070604/c
oo10869_fm.pdf
The findings of this article was that the 10% of the increase
in federal government spending was attributed to an ageing
population. The other 90% was as a result of diagnostic tests
and drugs.

conclusion
Australia has a publicly funded health system. This Medicare
system enables Australians to have a universal access of
treatment in publicly funded hospitals (Drummond, Sculpher,
Claxton, Stoddart and Torrance, 2015).
However, the increasing costs of healthcare over the years has
brought a strain on the pockets of the citizens . Some of the
causes of this increase is are an aging population which brings
about increased treatment of chronic diseases.
Other factors that have increases the costs are diagnostic tests
and pharmaceuticals. The governments should come up with
policies that will reduce these runaway costs.

References
Coory, M.D., 2004. Ageing and healthcare costs in Australia: a case of policy-based evidence?. Medical Journal of Australia, 180(11), p.581.
Drummond, M.F., Sculpher, M.J., Claxton, K., Stoddart, G.L. and Torrance, G.W., 2015. Methods for the
economic evaluation of health care programmes. Oxford university press.
Oldridge, N.B., 2008. Economic burden of physical inactivity: healthcare costs associated with cardiovascular
disease. European Journal of Cardiovascular Prevention & Rehabilitation, 15(2), pp.130-139.
Graves, N. and Zheng, H., 2014. Modelling the direct health care costs of chronic wounds in Australia.
WoundPractice & Research: Journal of the Australian Wound Management Association, 22(1), p.20.
Gunter, T.D. and Terry, N.P., 2005. The emergence of national electronic health record architectures in the United States and Australia:
models, costs, and questions. Journal of medical Internet research, 7(1).
Lehnert, T., Heider, D., Leicht, H., Heinrich, S., Corrieri, S., Luppa, M., Riedel-Heller, S. and König, H.H., 2011. Health care utilization and
costs of elderly persons with multiple chronic conditions. Medical Care Research and Review, 68(4), pp.387-420.