Academic Services and Registrar - Research Publications
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ItemStrengthening Medicare: will increasing the bulk-billing rate and supply of general practitioners increase access to Medicare-funded general practitioner services and does rurality matter?(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2005-08-20)BACKGROUND: Recent increases in the bulk-billing rate have been taken as an indication that the Federal government's Strengthening Medicare initiative, and particularly the bulk-billing incentives, are 'working'. Given the enduring geographic differences in the supply of general practitioners (GPs) it is timely to reconsider the impact that this increase in the provision of 'free care' will have on access to Medicare-funded GP services in rural and urban areas of Australia. Utilisation has been modelled as two different stochastic processes: the decision to consult and the frequency of consultation. RESULTS: In the decision to consult model the supply of FFS GPs is a more important predictor of utilisation than the bulk-billing rate. Paradoxically the modelling predicts that ceteris paribus increases in either GP supply or the bulk-billing rate appear to have perverse effects in some areas by decreasing utilisation. In the frequency of consultation model, GP density is not a predictor and increasing the bulk-billing rate will unambiguously increase the frequency of consultation across all areas. In both models, the positive impacts associated with changes in supply and cost are constrained outside the inner metropolitan area by reduced geographic accessibility to Medicare-funded GP services. The modelling also shows that people are more likely to consult a GP in areas of high socioeconomic disadvantage, although socioeconomic status is not a predictor of frequency of consultation. CONCLUSION: Bulk-billing rates and the supply of FFS GPs are important features of the Australian health care system that are, potentially, amenable to policy manipulation. The implications of this research are that government policies designed to achieve similarity in these characteristics across geographic areas will not result in equity of access because they fail to address problems caused by geographic inaccessibility in rural and remote areas. Attempting to increase bulk-billing rates in some of these areas may, in fact, reduce access to FFS GP services.
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ItemCultural Policy and Music in Mali(Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 2003)
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ItemEurafricans in Western Africa. Commerce, social status, gender, and religious observance from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, by George E. Brooks(The African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, 2004)
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ItemPopular Music and Politics in Sekou Toure's Guinea(African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, 2004)
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ItemSunjata. A West African Epic of the Mande People, by David C. Conrad(The African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, 2005)
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ItemConflict and collusion in Sierra Leone, by David Keen(African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific, 2006)
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ItemIslands of resilience: the history of the German strong verbs from a systemic point of view(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2007-11-27)
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ItemA grid service broker for scheduling e-Science applications on global data grids(John Wiley & Sons, 2006)The next generation of scientific experiments and studies, popularly called e-Science, is carried out by large collaborations of researchers distributed around the world engaged in the analysis of huge collections of data generated by scientific instruments. Grid computing has emerged as an enabler for e-Science as it permits the creation of virtual organizations that bring together communities with common objectives. Within a community, data collections are stored or replicated on distributed resources to enhance storage capability or the efficiency of access. In such an environment, scientists need to have the ability to carry out their studies by transparently accessing distributed data and computational resources. In this paper, we propose and develop a Grid broker that mediates access to distributed resources by: (a) discovering suitable data and computational resources sources for a given analysis scenario; (b) optimally mapping analysis jobs to resources; (c) deploying and monitoring job execution on selected resources; (d) accessing data from local or remote data sources during job execution; and (e) collating and presenting results. The broker supports a declarative and dynamic parametric programming model for creating Grid applications. We have used this model in Grid-enabling a high-energy physics analysis application (the Belle Analysis Software Framework). The broker has been used in deploying Belle experimental data analysis jobs on a Grid testbed, called the Belle Analysis Data Grid, having resources distributed across Australia interconnected through GrangeNet.