Page 3300 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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Health reform in the last term of government focused on hospitals, not the drivers that cause people to end up in hospitals. With 75 public and private Catholic hospitals across Australia, we absolutely support the need for hospital reform—but we’d prefer to keep people out of hospital. As a sophisticated nation, health reform needs to also consider the social determinants of health by linking education, housing, and welfare policies to health outcomes.
Catholic Health Australia called on governments to adopt the World Health Organisation’s social determinants of health framework, fund targeted preventative programs, fund non-government organisations to provide health promotion activities and actively support high school completion as a priority for those at risk of non-completion.
The Greens recognise and applaud the fact that the ACT has the highest level of school completion rates. Much of this is due to our higher average income, but for students from a low income background there are very good programs in the ACT to keep them involved. The ACT can and should look to adopt and move on those three other recommendations from Catholic Health Australia.
In 2008 the World Health Organisation’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health produced a report called Closing the gap in a generation—health equity through action on the social determinants of health. This report recommended that governments and policymakers incorporate the social determinants of health into health planning and programs.
Government can do this in four ways: one, through the development and improvement of universal social protection and support for level of income and healthy living for all; two, developing healthcare systems that use the principles of equity, disease prevention and health promotion; three, adopting a social determinants framework across policies and programs within the health departments and strengthening the stewardship role of implementing the framework across government; and, four, developing mechanisms to fund cross-government action on the social determinants of health and allocate these funds fairly between regions and social groups.
WHO, through another one of its networks, has also suggested that governments can use the social determinants of health to reduce health inequity in three more ways: one, by distributing resources in a more equitable way to ensure the provision of basic services, the protection of human rights and the right to a decent standard of living; two, by establishing and maintaining legislative and regulatory frameworks with the goal of health equity; and, three, by monitoring the health outcomes of different groups of consumers and evaluating programs that are targeted to reduce inequities to inform further interventions.
In addition, at a local level, ACTCOSS has recommended that in order to deliver greater social justice, program and policy developments need to ensure that people living with the most disadvantage are assisted in a holistic manner and that people experiencing disadvantage are delivered services across a range of ACT and commonwealth government departments.
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