Page 2309 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 1 November 1989
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concentrate on short-term benefits. You feel bad, so you go to the doctor or take a pill. It is difficult for any of us, as individuals or as a society, to look at the long-term benefits of preventive measures. But be sure that neglect results often in avoidable illness, in disability and in premature death. International comparisons between areas of high and low health status show that alterable factors such as diet appear overwhelmingly to explain the dramatic differences that can be observed.
Think of it this way: the cost of doing nothing is greater than just the cost for treatment and care of preventable conditions. This is because you must add to the treatment costs the costs for income maintenance and the associated loss of productivity. Prevention is generally cheaper than treatment, although its benefits may not always be obvious in the short term. The incidence alone of preventable illness and premature death suggests that the potential to improve health and reduce expenditure in the long term is huge.
The National Health and Medical Research Council has expressed such views and the Better Health Commission concluded that, while the costs of good prevention measures initially exceed benefits, savings in avoidable illness, premature death and health care costs can be substantial.
It is, of course, difficult to make precise predictions on savings. However, we do know that preventable premature death, illness and injury exact a massive toll from Australia. Accurate costings of their burden on health services and loss of productivity are hampered by inadequate and fragmented information, but estimates obtained from a variety of sources give some clear indication of their magnitude.
Motor vehicle accidents, for example, cost $3.5 billion per year, and members of the Assembly would see that in the context of the horrific accidents which have been reported on our national roads recently. Poor nutrition costs $6 billion; cardiovascular disease, $20 billion; alcohol abuse, $1.5 billion; and injuries at the workplace, $10 billion. It is to the credit of this Assembly that we have made some contribution to the reduction of injuries at the workplace by the introduction and passage of occupational health and safety legislation in this place yesterday. Add to these the costs of cigarette smoking and illegal drug use, and you begin to catch hold of the financial magnitude of the problem.
The financial case for prevention is perhaps nowhere more graphically shown that in the AIDS area, where only effective health promotion and illness prevention measures stand between the community and huge increases in health expenditures. It was just this sort of information which provided the rationale for the development of a coherent and well-funded national prevention program.
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