Health and health care in Australia at a crossroads

摘要

In 2008, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) signed up to a National Healthcare Agreement to improve not only health outcomes for all Australians but also health system sustainability. How are they doing? The latest report by the COAG Reform Council-Healthcare in Australia 2012-13: Five years of performance-has good and bad news. It shows that life expectancy has increased for men (790 years to 79-9 years) and women (837 years to 84-3 years), deaths from circulatory disease have fallen (from 2020 to 159-6 deaths per 100 000 people), as have deaths in children younger than 5 years (106-9 to 82-9 per 100 000 children) and the national smoking rate (from 19-1% to 16-3%).