ANZ Health Policy SIG Activities
From HPSIGWiki
Restoring the balance: The dynamics of decline of China’s health system with economic market reforms Geoff McDonnell John Dewdney Steven Tipper UNSW
Abstract: China’s economic transition from a planned soviet economy to a socialist market economy has resulted in substantial changes to its health system, with a significant impact on health outcomes and equity of access. This paper extends recent US health reform system dynamics work to synthesise the China health reform story in causal loop diagrams and illustrate it with available trend data. The analysis is based on translated papers from a high level Chinese Government think tank to plan health system changes for the next Five Year Period (the Flourishing Society). Its main recoommendations include extending financial coverage, focus on upstream interventions (public health, prevention and common disease interventions), and strengthening government responsibility) This natural experiment can provide insights into the problems associated with transition from hierarchical to market control mechanisms and the linkage between the overall socio-economic context and health care. KEYWORDS: Health Policy Dynamics, China Health Reform, Socio-Economic Context
Exploring the Political and Economic Dimensions of Health Policy Geoff McDonnell and Steven Tipper, UNSW
Abstract: This paper extends recent systems approaches to US health reform to the international sphere and explicitly represents the political and economic dimensions of health policy. The worldviews of health care as an industry with user as consumer, a profession with user as patient, and a societal right with user as citizen. Historical institutionalism and agency theory in health policy are represented and integrated, with focus on the extent and interaction of hierarchical, market and network control mechanisms on key system performance goals. This work can inform simulating international comparisons of health systems evolution and explicitly representing their ‘strife’ of less tangible political and vested interests, in order tounderstand, plan and test the acceptability of proposed health reforms in various countries and regions KEYWORDS: Health Policy, Health System Dynamics, Health Politics, Health Economics.
Modeling the Communications Dimension of Clinical Work & Medication Errors Pieter Toussaint, Margaret Williamson, Øystein Nytrø, Geoff McDonnell et al
Abstract: Hospital medication errors continue to be a significant problem despite the targeted use of information and communications technology (ICT) interventions. In an ongoing program to add an ‘in silico’ dimension to our multi-method multilevel evaluations we have modelled the significant role of communications in medication error at the context, process and task interaction levels. This extends our previous long-term context and process interaction system dynamics model and adds agent based modeling to more naturally represent the process and task interaction level. The conceptual model integrates previous relevant communications, work and organisational context, task interruption and cognitive overload modeling. The prime focus is to understand and integrate the multiple effects of ICT interventions at multiple levels that can combine to produce unintended results, including new errors. It is being extended to provide a high fidelity systems simulation testbed for designing and testing ICT interventions to reduce medication errors. KEYWORDS: Hospital Medication Error, Communications, ICT, System Dynamics and Agent based modeling
