Seeding success: identifying factors that contribute to positive early childhood health and development in Aboriginal children

Funded by NHMRC Project Grant. Promoting positive early childhood development is fundamental to improving life opportunities and outcomes for Aboriginal Australians. However, national data show that a significant proportion of Aboriginal children have markers of developmental vulnerability at school entry and this tracks through to poor literacy and numeracy outcomes across all schooling years. We currently lack information about the key drivers...

Population-level relevance of risk factors for cancer

We are estimating and comparing the population-level relevance of risk factors for cancer in Australia by applying our recently published PAF measure and program to data from established large-scale Australian cohort studies linked to national cancer and death registries (relative risk estimates) and nationally representative health survey (exposure prevalence estimates). Our method has been shown to provide more accurate estimates of the...

Measuring low value health care for targeted policy action

In January 2015 The Australian newspaper ran with the headline 'Health eyes $15bn payoff from war on waste', outlining; "Ten per cent of all health expenditure and as much as $15 billion a year could be saved through a concerted effort to reduce wasteful programs, marginal treatments and avoidable errors". However, despite growing awareness of this overuse phenomenon, there is scant hard data on the scale and nature of the problem of marginal...