Ruth Pitt
Vulcana Circus is a not-for-profit arts and recreation organisation that works with the circus traditions of inclusiveness, strength, excitement and courage to transform and empower individuals and communities. In this week’s post, they argue for greater recognition of the role of artistic and creative practices in achieving health and wellbeing outcomes.
Read MoreThe Ngulluk Moort, Ngulluk Boodja, Ngulluk Wirin (Our Family, Our Country, Our Spirit) Study is working with the leadership and staff at foster care agencies and community members to provide information about cultural connection, and cultural activity and resources for Aboriginal children living in non-Aboriginal care arrangements. In today’s post, they report on the outcomes of ‘The Truth of Our Stories’ , a cultural training workshop with a focus on truth-telling.
Read MoreIn today’s post, Cordelia Attenborough and Elroy Dearn from RMIT University give insight into the history of public housing in Victoria. This blog is written in the context of the Inquiry into the redevelopment of Melbourne’s public housing towers
Read MoreProfessor Hannah Badland from RMIT University explores why neighbourhoods matter for the health of children with disability, an area largely overlooked in Australian disability policy. This blog draws on an article published this week by Hannah and colleagues from RMIT University, which shows that Australian disability policy does not capture the complexity of this issue.
Read MoreIn their new article for a special issue of the Australian Economic Review, Sharon Bessell, Cadhla O’Sullivan, Trevor Rose, Megan Lang and Talia Avrahamzon, discuss the need for a child-centred measurement of poverty in Australia.
Read MoreHealth 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.
Read MoreWe 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.
Read MoreIt’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.
Read MoreRobodebt 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?
Read MoreThe 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
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreThe 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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