Cross-sector collaboration and working: How much time do we have to do things right?

Effective cross-sector collaboration and joint working among practitioners remains a Holy Grail that continues to elude us within health care. Networks such as clinical networks, alliances, taskforces and clinical leadership councils are examples of mechanisms that facilitate shared solutions design and implementation. Jade Hart challenges us to examine the goals of cross-sector collaboration and assess acceptable time horizons for the realisation of those goals.

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Power to Persuade
Boiling the workforce frog

What does workforce data reveal about the state of the nation? Stephen Gow, Open Advisory, explores the growth and evolution of the Australian workforce through recent periods of social and economic reform, and highlights key insights into where the Australian workforce (both current and future) is likely to be heading going forward. 

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Power to Persuade
Straightjacketing evaluation outcomes to conform with political agendas – an examination of the Cashless Debit Card Trial

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, Susan Tilley of Uniting Communities shares the findings of a discourse analysis of the ORIMA evaluations of the Cashless Debit Card Trials (CDCT), reporting that the evaluations are deeply imbued with government ideology.     

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Indigenous public servants need better career pathways

Governments will only be able to deliver better outcomes for Indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand if they embrace Indigenous knowledge and culture, collaborate better with communities and ensure that Indigenous people are appropriately represented at all levels of the public service. A new report from ANZSOG explores what can be done to improve the position of indigenous persons in the public sector. We present a summary below. This post originally appeared on the ANZSOG website.

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For women in the academy the fight for equity and justice has only just begun

Associate Professor Gemma Carey, Research Director. Centre for Social Impact. University of New South Wales. 

After taking part in the Australia Day protests in Canberra, I found myself in the ethically questionable position of attending an Australia day BBQ thrown by a friend of a friend. Yeah I know, January was a while ago. I've been digesting this personal reflection for a while and whether I wanted to speak out. Again... again... on this issue.

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We are creating new inequities around PrEP HIV Prevention

When the debate about public funding for PrEP started up, I was concerned that it would go down the same path as PEP — with a set pool of funding, left to state/territory governments to administer, with de facto rationing based on sexual risk, and only available from a set number of locations. So my own position on PrEP was that it needed to be funded via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and not rationed.

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Human Rights and the Cashless Debit Card: Examining the Limitation Requirement of Proportionality

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Power to Persuade is running a series of blogs drawn from the presentations made on the day. In this piece, Shelley Bielefeld from Australia National University analyses the Cashless Debit Card initiative to ascertain whether the concept of proportionality can justify the curtailing of certain human rights for communities subjected to the CDC.

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Trailblazers working together in cross-sector initiative to address financial exclusion

The Financial Inclusion Action Plan (FIAP) is an innovative collaboration that sees organisations across industry, government, not-for-profits and education coming together to improve financial inclusion and resilience across Australia. Here Vinita Godinho and Abigail Powell explain the importance of a program such as this and reveal findings from the evaluation of phase one of the FIAP program.

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One-way, mutually constitutive, or two autonomous spheres: what is the relationship between research and policy?

Academics are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy “impact”. But is this ambition predicated on an overly simplistic understanding of the policy process? Christina Boswell and Katherine Smith set out four different approaches to theorising the relationship between knowledge and policy and consider what each of these suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.

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The hidden costs of research assessment exercises: the curious case of Australia

Research assessment exercises provide the government and wider public with assurance of the quality of university research, with the guiding principles being accountability, transparency, and openness. But is there the same accountability and openness when it comes to the public cost of these large-scale exercises? 

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The mounting human costs of the Cashless Debit Card

The Cashless Debit Card Symposium was held at both the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Deakin Institute on Thursday, the 1st of February 2018. The Symposium attracted attendees from a range of backgrounds, including card-holders, representatives from community organisations, academics based at a number of Australian universities, Labor and Greens senators, and various other interested parties. A mix of presentations and panel discussions generated productive conversations around issues including the experience of being subject to the Cashless Debit Card (CDC), settler-colonial relations and the CDC, a rights-based perspective on income management, the consumer and banking implications of the CDC, income management and the social determinants of health, and perspectives on moving beyond current framings of welfare in Australia. Additionally, the Symposium featured a panel discussion on behavioural approaches in policy making. This is the first of several blogs that the Power to Persuade will publish based on the papers presented on the day. We kick off with an overview by Elise Klein, the organiser of the Symposium and a leading researcher into its harmful effects on communities and individuals. This paper is drawn in part from an article that ran in The Conversation; you can read it in its original form here.

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Our growing big cities need new centres of employment – here’s Melbourne’s chance

This week the national broadcaster's current affairs programs have focused on Australia's rapid population growth, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. Discussion has highlighted the policy and planning challenges posed for governments and communities when population growth outstrips infrastructure planning. Few regions are grappling with these challenges in the quite the same way as Melbourne's west.

In this piece, Rodney Maddock presents a three-pronged approach that considers changes to planning laws, transport improvements, and creation of decentralised employment hubs to meet Melbourne's growth challenges across the West. 

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Withdrawing funding for hospitals’ mistakes probably won’t lead to better patient care

The Commonwealth Government announced late last year that they are changing the way they fund hospitals. While the initiative aims to improve the quality of hospital care and reduce overall costs, the new policy may result in some negative impacts. Helen Dickinson, Associate Professor of UNSW Canberra's Public Service Research Group explains why the pay-for-performance scheme may lead to unintended consequences. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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Probation: An Underutilised Tool For Achieving High Performance

Performance management is key to achieving employee effectiveness and efficiency, but are organisations using probation as a tool to achieve high performance? Deborah Blackman, Fiona Buick, Samantha Johnson, and Michael O’Donnell of UNSW Canberra's Public Service Research Group believe that employers should use probation to help define high performance and encourage desired employee behaviour. 

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