How we design our cities can make it harder to be healthy. City planners are now able to quantify the different elements that are affecting our health and well-being.
The deaths of huge numbers of the elderly in our care homes due to COVID-19 made clear the need to integrate our health and social care services. Here’s what needs to be done.
A young girl receives a COVID-19 vaccine during the second day of vaccination for children aged five to 11 years old in Montréal in November 2021.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
Singapore will start charging people who choose not to be vaccinated for any COVID-related hospital care. While Australia’s hospitals are also under pressure, we shouldn’t follow suit.
Compared to ten similar countries, Australia does well on equity and health care outcomes. But it still has a way to go on access and how well the health system fits together.
To get to stage C of the plan out of COVID, 80% of adults over 16 need to be vaccinated. But that equates to just under 65% of all Australians – too low to safely open international borders.
If we open up the international borders before enough of the population is vaccinated, hospitals could become overwhelmed and deaths would be unacceptably high.
Both sex and gender analysis are crucial to health research to enable access to appropriate health information, diagnoses and care for gender-diverse populations.
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Sex is not gender but research continues to treat these as the same concept, with potentially damaging consequences for health studies, health policies and health programs.
Medical breakthroughs like the COVID-19 vaccines need to be matched with programs that tackle health inequality.
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With enough vaccine supplies coming online from October, the government has no excuse not to have all arrangements in place for an efficient vaccination program. Here’s what needs to change.
A sustainable private health insurance system requires enough young, healthy people paying premiums and not making claims. But government policies haven’t achieved this. Here’s what to try instead.
Unequal access to preventive resources such as healthy foods, a family doctor, health screening and health promotion programs put some groups at increased risk for chronic illness.
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While the pandemic has focused the world’s attention on how to prevent infectious disease, many of the lessons learned from COVID-19 prevention can also be applied to chronic disease prevention.
Independent assessments were meant to make access to the NDIS fairer. But disability groups disagree and want them stopped.
Activists wave flags in front of the U.S. Capitol to demand that Congress pass cannabis reform legislation on Oct. 8, 2019.
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images
A cannabis decriminalization bill approved by the House is a sign from Congress that sentiment around the drug is evolving, but it misses a chance to regulate marijuana for the good of all Americans.
Most of these initiatives still place emphasis on getting people to change their eating and lifestyle habits.
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Honorary Enterprise Professor, School of Population and Global Health, and Department of General Practice and Primary Care, The University of Melbourne