Health has often been a peripheral consideration in the development of climate policies despite climate measures having a material impact on health outcomes. In today’s post, VicHealth Research Impact Grant recipients Annabelle Workman and Kathryn Bowen, both of the Melbourne Climate Futures at the University of Melbourne, share their findings on addressing barriers and meeting needs through the co-design of ‘healthier’ climate policy development.
You can access the toolkit here: healthier climate policies toolkit.
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We rely on the public service to implement sweeping policy decisions and reform – but we have had some recent examples of what can go wrong when the decision-makers don’t get it quite right. In today’s blog, Andrew Joyce and Fiona Buick share insights from their examination of how the NDIS was rolled out. Interviews identified key points where the decision-making process could have been more robust. The authors reflect on what the public service could learn from this case study.
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It’s long been known that green spaces can improve our wellbeing, but in today’s post Rongbin Xu, Tingting Ye and Yumin Guo, all of the Climate, Air Quality Research (CARE) unit at Monash University, share their research which demonstrates the emerging understanding of how green spaces protect our physical health as well. Such findings point to the importance of green spaces as planning and policy priorities.
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Robodebt highlighted how a government initiative, designed and delivered by the public sector, could cause profound harm to vulnerable people. For many of us interested in Australian social policy a central question remains: how do we ensure something like this never happens again?
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The literature on policy diffusion is replete with examples, theories and frameworks about how ‘good’ policy travels. Many industries (such as healthcare and air transport) are built around learning from others’ mistakes and near-misses. Yet in public policy, the literature is more despondent about the ability of lessons from crises to successfully travel. This is the issue that Dr Maria Maley and I explore in Robodebt and the limits of learning: exploring meaning-making after a crisis
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In complex healthcare systems, staff voice is vital for ensuring healthcare professionals and service providers uphold safe, ethical and high-quality care. When staff are unable to voice concerns about patient safety or their own wellbeing, mistakes and misconduct are more likely to go unaddressed, allowing scandals to happen or last longer. Organisations such as the National Health Service (NHS) have been long aware of these risks and currently use “speaking up” policies to combat the silencing or neglect of staff concerns. After 9 years of speaking up policy many NHS staff still find themselves unheard or silenced. Now, the U.K. government’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which oversees the NHS, proposes new plans to remove these existing policies and introduce new staff voice policy under the NHS Fit for the Future strategy (NHS England, 2025). In this blog post Sukhwinder Essie Kaur unpacks the failings of Speaking Up and explores how co-production research may be a key player in designing new policies and mechanism that better support NHS staff to voice their concerns.
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The boom in mental health awareness can be seen all around us – from branded ad campaigns (think Maybelline’s “Brave Together”) to celebrities and movies addressing mental health issues (think Prince Harry; Joker) – it’s hard to avoid content urging us to be knowledgeable of what mental health struggles are like, and to be unafraid to come forward and talk about them. However, alongside this wave of heightened awareness has been an enormous rise in rates of mental health diagnosis. Anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism rates have all risen substantially for UK youth in the last 20 years, according to one study by Cybulski et al. (2021), and many other studies report similar findings from around the world. So, in this post, Shayna Weisz asks ‘what is going on?’
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The role played by the police in our wider mental health system has never been truly resolved. In both Australia and the United Kingdom, as across the world, discussion is at its most intense when considering police contact deaths involving those of us affected by our mental health. In this blog, Michael Brown explores the complex issues behind tragic outcomes and starts to think about how to embed “lessons learned” into policy.
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Australians with disability and their families are well aware that living with disability can be very expensive – and yet our national poverty statistics and indicators do not take account of the hidden costs and earning barriers of being disabled in Australia. In their new article for a special issue of the Australian Economic Review, Sue Olney and Sophie Yates discuss the links between disability and poverty. They also explore why we need to think about using both monetary and non-monetary indicators (drawing on the knowledge of people with lived experience of both disability and poverty) to capture the full picture of inequality between people with and without disability in Australia.
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Shanza Shafeek, fourth-year Law and Arts (Sociology) student at Monash University, discusses Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander maternal health inequality, some promising initiatives to address it, and urgently needed reforms to boost Indigenous-led and culturally safe models of care.
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Dr Colette Einfeld has recently published Knowledge, Evidence, and Policymaking: Behavioural Sciences in Australia, drawing on her PhD about nudge and behavioural science. Here she explains how she came across the concept of nudging, her increasingly critical approach to the field, and the book’s main arguments.
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A practical, tested framework for innovation in the NFP space that is grounded in real-world experience, not just theory.
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In preparing a submission to the Victorian Government’s Multicultural Review, Good Shepherd staff uncovered rich insights about the experiences of multicultural communities and the role of community services in fostering belonging, equity.
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